The Slow Regard of Silent Things

The Slow Regard of Silent Things is a fantasy novella by the American writer Patrick Rothfuss, published in 2014. It is a side story set in the world of his Kingkiller Chronicle.

The book takes place in the Underthing, a dark and mostly forgotten region beneath the University of the series, made up of a broken web of ancient passageways and abandoned rooms, where a young woman named Auri lives tucked away among the tunnels. Auri is one of the more enigmatic figures in the Kingkiller Chronicle, and the novella gives her the narration of a short book of her own: what she does with her days, how she understands the place she lives in, and the small adventure that belongs to her rather than to the main character of the series. It is a story about a broken girl trying to live in a broken world, and it offers a view of the setting from a character who knows things that the other books keep hidden.

Rothfuss wrote it between the large volumes of the series, and it was published as a much shorter book than the two novels that precede it.