'A truly extraordinary saga . . . The characterizations are consistently superb, and [Hobb] animates everything with love for and knowledge of the sea.'-- Booklist Bingtown is a hub of exotic trade and home to a merchant nobility famed for its liveships--rare vessels carved from wizardwood, which ripens magically into sentient awareness. Now the fortunes of one of Bingtown's oldest families rest on the newly awakened liveship Vivacia .   For Althea Vestrit, the ship is her rightful legacy. For Althea's young nephew, wrenched from his religious studies and forced to serve aboard the ship, the Vivacia is a life sentence. But the fate of the ship--and the Vestrits--may ultimately lie in the hands of an outsider: the ruthless buccaneer captain Kennit, who plans to seize power over the Pirate Isles by capturing a liveship and bending it to his will.   Praise for Robin Hobb and the Liveship Traders Trilogy   'Fantasy as it ought to be written . . . Robin Hobb's books are diamonds in a sea of zircons.' --George R. R. Martin   'A major work of high fantasy, reading like a cross between Tolkien and Patrick O'Brian . . . one of the finest fantasy sagas to bridge the millennium.' -- Publishers Weekly   'Rich, complex . . . [Hobb's] plotting is complex but tightly controlled, and her descriptive powers match her excellent visual imagination. But her chief virtue is that she delineates character extremely well.' -- Interzone