Eragon

Eragon is the first book of The Inheritance Cycle by the American writer Christopher Paolini, who began writing it after leaving home schooling at fifteen. He spent a year on the first draft and a second rewriting it, and his family self-published the manuscript in 2001. The novelist Carl Hiaasen passed the manuscript to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, and a revised edition followed in 2003.

The story opens with an ambush: a Shade named Durza and a group of Urgals attack a party of elves, kill two of them and try to take an egg carried by the survivor, who manages to send it elsewhere with magic. She is taken prisoner at the city of Gil'ead. The egg ends up in the mountains, where a farm boy named Eragon finds it while hunting and discovers, when it hatches, that he has a dragon.

His village is destroyed by the king's servants looking for the dragon, and he leaves with an old storyteller, the dragon growing on his shoulder, and a plan to find the people who killed his uncle. The Empire has been ruled for a century by a dragon rider who turned on his own order, and a new rider is a threat that has to be removed. Eragon and Saphira travel across Alagaësia towards the Varden, and every city they pass through has someone in it who would sell them to the king.

The Inheritance Cycle continues in Eldest, Brisingr and Inheritance, and the first book establishes Eragon, Saphira, the Empire and the rebellion it is heading towards. It is a young adult fantasy told as a single continuous story across four volumes, and it begins in a quiet mountain valley before widening to the whole continent.