The Crippled God

The Crippled God is an epic fantasy novel by the Canadian writer Steven Erikson. It is the tenth and final volume of the Malazan Book of the Fallen.

The book follows immediately on from the events of Dust of Dreams, with Adjunct Tavore leading the Bonehunters further into the Letherii wastelands. Tavore is a woman with no gift for magic, considered plain and unprepossessing, who displays nothing that would ordinarily inspire loyalty or confidence, and she means to challenge the gods if her own troops do not kill her first. What waits for the army and its allies is the Forkrul Assail, described as the final arbiters of humanity, who draw on an alien power of terrible magnitude and intend to cleanse the world by annihilating every human being and every civilisation in it. The army it is leading has been savaged by the K'Chain Nah'Ruk and is tormented by questions, and the novel carries the shaky allegiances Tavore has built into the last stage of the campaign. Erikson has said that he considers Dust of Dreams and The Crippled God to be two halves of a single concluding book rather than two separate novels.

The Malazan sequence was published across ten volumes and a set of related books, and it is written as a history of its invented world rather than as the story of one hero.