The Name of the Wind

The Name of the Wind, subtitled The Kingkiller Chronicle: Day One, is the heroic fantasy novel by Patrick Rothfuss, an American author. DAW Books published it on 27 March 2007, and it opens the Kingkiller Chronicle, whose second day, The Wise Man's Fear, came next. The series is set in Temerant, a continent whose known part is called the Four Corners of Civilization, divided into several nations and cultures that mostly follow a faith resembling medieval Christianity.

The mortal world has a counterpart in the realm of the Fae, another universe whose supernatural inhabitants can cross between the two only when the moon is full. Kvothe keeps an inn in a quiet village under a name that is not his own, and he is not good at being ordinary. When a scribe with an interest in his reputation turns up, he agrees to tell his story properly, in three days, and this novel is the first day.

The account covers a childhood in a travelling troupe, years on the streets of a city after somebody killed everyone he knew, and the scholarship, poverty and badly chosen enemy that came with a place at the University. The telling is framed by the present: an inn, a war in the countryside and a scribe who wants the full account. Rothfuss moves between the two, so the reader knows more about Kvothe's reputation than the story has yet explained.

The series is unfinished, with the second day published in 2011 and a third volume still to come. The first book establishes Kvothe, the University and the world's magic, and it is written as the opening of a trilogy rather than a self-contained novel, and it assumes the reader will follow the account into the later days.