The Book in Brief
Godkiller is the debut novel of British author Hannah Kaner and the first book of the Fallen Gods trilogy, followed by Sunbringer (2024) and Faithbreaker (2025). Published in early 2023 by HarperVoyager, it became a No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller and launched one of the most talked-about new fantasy series of the decade. It's a fast, brutal, and emotionally sharp story — best described as a road-trip quest fantasy about gods, the humans who worship them, and the mercenaries who hunt them. Told through four rotating close-third points of view, it pairs the mercenary-with-a-monster-target flavor of The Witcher with a warm, found-family heart.
At around 290 pages across a prologue and thirty-seven chapters, Godkiller is a lean epic. Its cast is notably inclusive without fanfare: a bisexual, disabled protagonist; queer relationships treated as ordinary; a Deaf character; and heroes living with trauma. That representation, along with the book's found-family core, became one of the most-praised elements of Kaner's debut.
The World: Middren, Gods, and Godkillers
The story takes place in the country of Middren and its neighbors, chiefly the fire-worshipping land of Talicia to the north.
Gods are made by belief. A god comes into being wherever people direct their desire and devotion. Put up a shrine, make offerings, whisper prayers, and a god forms — a god of a river, a crossroads, broken sandals, midwifery, the hearth, the sea, fire. The more people believe and sacrifice, the more powerful the god grows. Gods can take physical form, change size, and mark their followers with blessings or curses. They are tethered to a shrine, which anchors them the way a keel holds a ship together.
Gods make bargains. A devotee can ask a god for something — protection, luck, a life saved — but there is always a price, often a physical mark, a maiming, or worse. As gods grow strong they tend to grow greedy, escalating from small offerings to demands for blood and, eventually, human sacrifice.
The God War. Years before the novel opens, the gods of the great port city of Blenraden turned on the people, and a catastrophic war erupted. Blenraden was the epicenter; it was devastated and left a haunted ruin where wild, masterless gods still linger.
Arren's ban. In the aftermath, King Arren of Middren outlawed the worship of all gods. Shrines are smashed, pilgrimage is illegal, offerings are contraband, and the king's face has replaced the old idols on mantels and in town squares. To enforce the ban, the crown licenses veiga — godkillers — mercenaries who hunt and destroy gods for coin. To kill a god, a veiga must destroy its physical form and its shrine and scatter any anchor that could let it re-form. The signature weapon is briddite, a metal that can wound and kill gods.
The Main Characters
Kissen (Kissenna) is the protagonist and title character, a hard-bitten veiga with red hair, a foul mouth, and a spiderweb scar from a broken curse. Talician by birth, she lost her lower right leg as a child and wears a prosthesis of briddite, steel, and leather, fighting as well as any knight. Bisexual and fiercely loyal beneath her armor of cynicism, she hunts gods because a fire god's cult murdered her family.
Inara Craier is a sheltered twelve-year-old, the hidden daughter of the noblewoman Lady Craier. She has never left her family's estate and carries a dangerous secret: she is bonded to a god and can see people's emotions as colors.
Skediceth (Skedi) is a small god of white lies, shaped like a cross between a hare, a deer, and a bird, able to shrink to mouse-size or grow larger. He is inexplicably bonded to Inara — neither can stray far from the other without pain — and neither remembers how the bond formed. He is charming, scheming, and terrified of dying; he longs for a shrine and worshippers of his own.
Elogast (Elo) is a former knight-commander and war hero, King Arren's closest friend and almost-brother. Traumatized by the God War, he laid down his sword to become a baker. Kind and honorable, he is pulled back into service when the king comes calling.
King Arren is the ruler who outlawed the gods after watching his family destroyed. He carries a secret that unravels over the course of the book — his own survival depends on the very kind of power he claims to despise.
Hseth is the fire god of Talicia, made of flame and red hair, worshipped through burning and human sacrifice. Ever-hungry for fuel and followers, she is the rising antagonist force and Kissen's personal nemesis. Osidisen is the old sea god who once favored Kissen's family. Yatho and Telle are Kissen's adopted sisters in the city of Lesscia — Yatho a blacksmith who uses a wheelchair, Telle a Deaf archivist — and Legs is Kissen's horse.
Opening and Setup
The prologue drops the reader into horror roughly fifteen years before the main story. In a coastal Talician village, young Kissen and her family — favored by the sea god Osidisen, to whom her father was devoted — are drugged, bound, and prepared as a sacrifice. Their neighbors have switched their allegiance to the rising fire god Hseth, chasing the wealth her worship promises. Kissen wakes mid-ritual as the house is set alight. Her mother swears the sea god will save them; he does not. As flames take the family, something falls and crushes Kissen's leg. Her father, dying, makes a final bargain with Osidisen to save her — hacks her trapped foot free and throws her into the sea as the god carries her away. The village later falls into the sea. Rescued but orphaned, Kissen is patched up and sold to a woman who exploited orphan beggars, whom the children called Maimee. This is the wound that makes Kissen who she is.
Fifteen years later, Kissen is a working veiga in Middren. She tracks and kills a greedy, newly risen river god called Ennerast near the town of Ennerton, driving briddite into the god's heart and destroying the shrine so it cannot return. These early chapters establish the world's rules, Kissen's competence and pragmatism — she kills gods that harm people and for pay, not indiscriminately — and her private grief.
Inara's introduction comes as she sneaks off her family's estate for the first time and reaches Ennerton. Overwhelmed by the colors of strangers' emotions, she hears that a godkiller is in town and seeks Kissen out, desperate for answers about the god bound to her — Skedi. Kissen's reaction is hostile and skeptical; a small god with no shrine, bound to a living child, should be impossible. Before anything can be resolved, angry townsfolk who worshipped Ennerast burst in and attack.
The Attack on the Craier Estate
Kissen decides to escort Inara home. But when they arrive, the Craier estate has been burned to the ground and everyone slaughtered — Inara's mother, Lady Craier, presumed dead among them. Inara survives only because she was away. The parallel to Kissen's own childhood is exact and devastating: two orphans of fire, decades apart. Recognizing herself in the girl, Kissen — who has one hard rule, that she does not kill people — makes an oath to protect Inara.
The problem is Skedi. Because god and girl are bound, Kissen cannot simply kill the god without killing the child, and the two cannot be separated by force without agony or death. Kissen takes Inara to the city of Lesscia, seeking refuge with her adopted sisters Yatho and Telle. In their home the group works out the stakes: Skedi is bound to Inara in a way no one understands, and the only way to sever the bond safely is to bring it before a god powerful enough to break it — which means returning to Blenraden, the ruined city where the last wild gods remain.
The Group Forms
Because open travel to Blenraden is illegal, the group joins a secret pilgrim train — believers making the forbidden journey to the dead city. On this road, Kissen crosses paths with Elogast.
Elo's thread has run in parallel. A retired knight-commander turned baker, he has spent three years trying to bury the war. Then King Arren — his childhood friend and the man he served — arrives at his door, secretly dying. The wound Arren took in the war's last battle has never healed; something a god did to keep him alive is now failing. Arren asks Elo to make a pilgrimage to Blenraden and beg a god there to save him — a bitter irony, given that Arren outlawed the gods and Elo helped purge Blenraden's shrines. Out of loyalty, Elo goes, telling no one his true purpose. Before he leaves, a curse is pressed into him.
Kissen, Elo, Inara, and Skedi thus travel together, each hiding their real reasons. Two of them are secretly godkillers; one is a god; one is a girl with powers she does not understand. The tension of concealed secrets — and the slow, grudging warmth that grows anyway — drives this stretch of the book.
The Journey to Blenraden
The pilgrimage is beset by danger. Shadow demons — god-summoned monsters — repeatedly attack the caravan, drawn by the curse laid on Elo. The first assault forces Kissen and Elo to reveal their fighting skills and their godkilling weapons, exposing their shared trade to one another and shattering their cover stories. Innocent pilgrims die in these attacks.
Across the journey the four are transformed by each other. Kissen's isolation cracks; her fierce protectiveness of Inara deepens into something like family, and a charged attraction develops between her and Elo. Inara grows from a sheltered child into a capable traveler and a better archer than Kissen. Skedi, hungry for worship and freedom, wrestles with his own nature — the temptation to manipulate, to grasp at power, to put his survival above Inara's trust. Hints accumulate that Inara is far more than a noble's hidden daughter — her ability to see emotions and, increasingly, to influence gods points to a secret in her parentage. Meanwhile the reader glimpses signs that Middren is sliding toward civil war and that Arren's rule is far shakier — and stranger — than it appears.
Blenraden and the Climax
The group reaches Blenraden, a spectacular, dangerous ruin full of wild, careless gods, opportunistic guards, and remnants of the war. Here every thread converges. Inara and Skedi confront what their bond truly means and what breaking it would cost. Elo goes to find the god who has been sustaining Arren — the hearth god Hestra — to beg a cure. And Kissen comes face to face with the wild gods, and ultimately with Hseth, the fire god who burned her family.
The King Arren revelation. Elo's mission is a trap. The truth is that Arren never truly needed saving in the honest sense. When he was mortally wounded in the war, the hearth god Hestra took root in his chest — where his heart once beat, a god's flame now burns. Rather than seeking a mere cure, Arren has been cultivating divine power. His secret plan is to complete his own ascension and set himself up as a god-king who will supplant all other gods and unify Middren under himself. To finish the transformation he needs the ultimate offering — a willing human sacrifice — and he has maneuvered his most loyal friend into the role, because gods love martyrs. Elo, discovering that the Arren he has been trying to save is now a human-god hybrid entangled with fire-god power, nearly sacrifices himself before the horror of the betrayal breaks through. Arren reveals himself as the hidden rot at the story's heart, and the friendship that defined Elo is over.
Inara's power. In the chaos, Inara's latent ability erupts: she can compel gods with her voice — command them, not merely see them. She breaks free when Skedi tries to seize control of her body, and she physically removes the curse from Elo. This shatters and reshapes her bond with Skedi and marks her as something unprecedented — pointing toward the mystery, confirmed later in the series, that her father was a god.
Kissen and Hseth. The fire god Hseth manifests in the climax, monstrous and made of flame. Kissen — wearing briddite-plated gloves — grapples the god and drags her off Blenraden's shrine-cliffs into the sea, calling on the sea god Osidisen by name, finally cashing in the bargain her father died to make. Osidisen destroys Hseth. But Kissen falls with the god into the water and vanishes beneath the waves. To Inara, Elo, and Skedi, watching from above, Kissen is dead — sacrificed to save them and to kill the god who defined her whole life. The novel deliberately mirrors its own opening: the prologue ends with Kissen thrown into the sea and saved by Osidisen; the book ends with Kissen falling into the sea with Hseth and begging Osidisen to save her again.
The Ending and Cliffhanger
Godkiller closes on a series of gut-punches and open wounds. Kissen is believed killed but has, in fact, survived — Osidisen pulls her from the sea, though her friends do not know it. Hseth is dead — but not for long, because fire gods return as long as they are worshipped, and her fanatical Talician followers are already at work resurrecting her, with an invasion of Middren brewing. Arren's true nature is exposed as a would-be god-king with a divine flame where his heart should be, willing to sacrifice his oldest friend for power. Elo has turned against Arren, his faith in his king broken. Inara and Skedi's bond remains unbroken, its origin still a mystery, and Inara has discovered a power over gods that changes everything — even as Skedi's betrayal has fractured their trust.
The result is a self-contained adventure that nonetheless detonates into a much larger war, setting up Sunbringer.
What the Book Is About
Belief and faith as power. Kaner's central conceit — that gods are literally made and fed by human belief — turns faith into a tangible, dangerous currency. Worship creates gods; forgetting them kills them; and both the giving and the withdrawing of belief carry terrible costs. The book refuses easy answers: a world without gods loses the god of midwives and the small comforts of the divine, even as it escapes the tyranny of the greedy ones.
The danger and the comfort of gods. Gods here run the full moral spectrum, from benevolent healers to Hseth's ravenous cruelty. The same force that protects a village can demand its children. Kaner uses this to interrogate black-and-white thinking: Arren's total ban is as much a tyranny as the gods' worst excesses.
Found family. The beating heart of the book is the reluctant, prickly, deeply moving family that forms among a godkiller, a god, a girl, and a knight, reinforced by Kissen's adopted sisters. Wounded people making each other a little less alone is the book's emotional thesis.
Grief and vengeance. Kissen's entire life is organized around a childhood atrocity. The novel traces her slow, incomplete movement from a person defined by hatred to one capable of protection and love — and asks what vengeance actually costs the avenger.
Power and tyranny. Arren's arc is a study in how the pursuit of control corrupts. His flame-in-the-chest is a literal image of humanity consumed by the hunger for power.
Disability and difference. Kissen's prosthesis is treated as ordinary and often advantageous; the narrative never frames her, Telle, or Yatho as lesser, and pointedly has Kissen decline the chance at a "fixed" body because she accepts who she is. This matter-of-fact representation is one of the novel's most celebrated features.
About the Book
Godkiller is the first novel in Hannah Kaner's Fallen Gods trilogy, continued in Sunbringer (2024) and concluded in Faithbreaker (2025). It was published in the UK by HarperVoyager in January 2023 and in the US by Harper Voyager in September 2023, and runs a prologue plus thirty-seven chapters told from four points of view — Kissen, Inara, Elogast, and Skedi.
Kaner's debut was a major commercial success, debuting at No. 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list and becoming a USA Today bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer at the 2024 Hugos, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the British Book Awards Debut Fiction Book of the Year, and the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer, and was named an inaugural Waterstones Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of the Month. Kaner's work has been published in more than a dozen languages.
Marketed for fans of The Witcher and Terry Pratchett, the book has drawn wide praise for its found-family warmth, its unflinching disability and LGBTQ+ representation, and its fresh, belief-powered magic system. An assured, propulsive debut with a golden heart of its own, Godkiller announced Hannah Kaner as a significant new voice in fantasy.
A note on content: the book opens with attempted child sacrifice and contains depictions of grief, trauma, and violence, and that while its central adventure resolves, it ends on a deliberate cliffhanger that sets up the wider war of the trilogy.