Foundryside
Robert Jackson Bennett's Foundryside opens the Founders trilogy in Tevanne, a Mediterranean style city state run by four merchant houses whose wealth comes from scriving, a written magic that can convince objects to disobey reality. Sancia Grado is a former enslaved laborer turned thief in the slum called Foundryside, hired for a routine break in at the city's waterfront vault. The artifact she steals turns out to be Clef, a sentient golden key with the power to break any lock or scriving in existence and an alarming amount of opinions. Pursued by the merchant houses and aided by a small crew of misfits, including a relentlessly principled junior officer named Gregor Dandolo, Sancia uncovers a conspiracy that reaches back to the lost hierophants who first taught humans how to write to the world. Bennett blends a fast caper with serious thinking about labor, language, and how empires turn ordinary people into tools.
What you might want to know about Foundryside
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A young thief breaks into a vault to steal a small artifact and finds it can talk. With a sharp-tongued magical key as her partner, she takes on the merchant houses that run her city and its workshops.
Robert Jackson Bennett's Founders trilogy has three books: Foundryside, Shorefall, and Locklands. The trilogy is complete and follows the same protagonists across an escalating magical-industrial conflict.
Foundryside introduces a complex magical scriving system in its opening chapters. Most readers find the world clicks within 50 pages and the heist-driven plot is propulsive once it starts. The series gets more conceptually ambitious in later books.
Foundryside was written by Robert Jackson Bennett, published in 2018 by Broadway Books.
Foundryside is 503 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Foundryside takes most readers 8 to 11 hours to finish.
Foundryside is a standalone novel by Robert Jackson Bennett, not part of a series.
Foundryside is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
