The Wounded Land was published by Del Rey/Ballantine in 1980, beginning the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Set thousands of years after the First Chronicles (though only ten years have passed in Covenant’s world), it reveals a Land transformed into nightmare: the Sunbane — a corruption of natural law that forces the environment through cycles of pestilence, rain, desert, and fertility every few days — has destroyed the ecology and reduced the inhabitants to desperate survival.
Covenant is summoned back with a new companion: Linden Avery, a physician who can perceive the health and sickness of living things with supernatural clarity. Linden provides the reader’s perspective (she can react to events with the shock appropriate to encountering them for the first time) while Covenant carries the weight of his history: his guilt over the rape in the first trilogy, his knowledge of what the Land once was, and his awareness that his earlier actions — however necessary — contributed to this devastation.
The Sunbane is Donaldson’s most ambitious world-building: a corruption not of people but of natural law itself, turning the Land’s fundamental ecology into a weapon. Plants grow explosively and then rot; rains dissolve flesh; pestilence boils from the ground. The remaining communities survive by feeding blood to the earth (the Clave, a religious institution that has replaced the Council, demands blood sacrifice to hold the Sunbane at bay — though it is actually the Clave that perpetuates it).
The novel is darker than anything in the First Chronicles: longer, more complex, more morally ambiguous, and more demanding of both its characters and its readers.
Collecting The Wounded Land
First edition (Del Rey/Ballantine, New York, 1980): Hardcover, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Signed first edition: $50–$120
- Without jacket: $5–$12
The beginning of the Second Chronicles. Less scarce than the First Chronicles firsts (larger print run by 1980) but sought by completists.