The Dragons, written by Douglas Niles and published in 1996, is a novel in the prolific Dragonlance series of fantasy novels, which began with a story in a Dungeons & Dragons role-playing campaign in the early 1980s and later expanded into the trilogy known as the Chronicles series. That series spawned hundreds of other novels, including this one. This book is part of a series of novels that fill in gaps in events mentioned but not fully explored in the Chronicles and Legends trilogies. This book details the lives of a number of good and evil dragons, some of whom are first introduced in the Chronicles series, but most are new to this book. The events begin about 8500 years before the Cataclysm (the big event in the Dragonlance setting that divides time periods), making it the first novel if you read them in chronological order, and end with the conclusion to the War of the Lance (which occurred 350 years after the Cataclysm and was the story in the Chronicles trilogy). In it, we learn about the dragons' role in the original war in which Takhisis attempted to take over, their subsequent exile from Krynn, and the good dragons' decision to return to fight in the War of the Lance.
For years, the book was only available in mass-market paperback, and is now available in electronic form. The first edition of the paperback book is 315 pages long. It does spoil some of what happens in the Chronicles series. So, if you are just getting into the Dragonlance series and have not read the Chronicles trilogy (or have not finished them) and care about spoilers, then it is best to read this after those novels. Most of the book (about 3/4) is set in the centuries before the War of the Lance. If you have read the Chronicles series, the last 1/4 of the story will be more familiar and will probably read more quickly. While I would not say that it is as good as any of the novels in the Chronicles and Legends trilogies (basically, the original six books in the Dragonlance universe) and can be slow in parts, it is worth reading if that part of the story interests you. It is not, however, integral to the storyline in the "primary" novels, so you will not miss anything vital if you do not read this one.
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