Toll the Hounds

Toll the Hounds is the eighth novel in the Malazan Book of the Fallen, the epic fantasy series by the Canadian writer Steven Erikson. It was first published on 30 June 2008 in the UK and Canada and on 16 September 2008 in the United States.

The novel centres on the legacy of Anomander Rake, the Son of Darkness and Lord of the Tiste Andii, and on the convergence of a number of powers in the city of Darujhistan. Its prologue is divided into four separate scenes, the first of which takes place in something like a necropolis, and much of what follows returns to characters from earlier books of the series, among them Gardens of the Moon and Memories of Ice. Erikson has said that he found this novel difficult to write because of personal circumstances, which he later confirmed was the death of his father, and that he had planned from very early in the series to write it in the voice of Kruppe. Readers and reviewers have treated the tone and style of the book as distinctive within the sequence.

The Malazan books are written as a long history of an invented world rather than as the story of a single protagonist, and each volume carries a large cast forward from the ones before it.