Jacqueline Carey's KUSHIEL series optioned by Lionsgate

All nine books in Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series of fantasy novels have been optioned by Lionsgate.

Art by Tran Nguyen.

Lionsgate have picked up the rights to the trilogy-of-trilogies with a view for developing them for film, TV or possibly both. The early announcement suggests a film (presumably of the first book in the series, Kushiel's Dart), but both options seem to be on the table.

The Kushiel series is set in a fantasied, alternate-reality version of Europe, principally in the kingdom of Terre d'Ange (a parallel history version of France). The series deals with complex worldbuilding, including a parallel version of Christianity which evolved in a very different form, not to mention a different version of Judaism. The series is also noted for its explicit sexual politics, which would seem to favour a TV adaptation rather than a movie (which would have to be rated R).

This is only an option for now and Lionsgate have been through some difficulties recently, including some setbacks to their Kingkiller Chronicle mixed TV-and-movie project. However, the Kushiel series has the benefit of being complete, which addresses the major problem with the Kingkiller project.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 29

One of the most common criticisms of epic fantasy is how lightweight and silly it can be, saying nothing about the human condition or developing relevant themes and instead being consumed by spectacle and forgettable action. This criticism is intermittently justified, with many lightweight or lowbrow works existing in the genre as indeed there are in all genres, but in the 1990s and 2000s fantasy was moving ever more decisively in favour of works which did feature more thought, rumination and artistic intent.

At the forefront of these were works like A Song of Ice and Fire and The Malazan Book of the Fallen, but numerous authors were engaged in writing fantasies that engaged in relevant topics for a contemporary reader, such as religion, power and politics. But three series in particular emerged at the turn of the millennium which provided much food for thought, were all controversial and all highly divisive amongst fans of the genre.

Heroes Die

Published in 1998, Heroes Die is the first novel in the Acts of Caine sequence by Matt Woodring Stover. This series is a rationalised fantasy, with an SF explanation for events in the series. In the 23rd Century humanity has created portal technology linking Earth with a traditional fantasy world called Overworld. Special agents known as "Actors" are sent to Overworld to pose as heroes or villains, fighting battles for the amusement of television audiences back home. The most famous of these is Hari Michaelson, known on Overworld as Caine. In Heroes Die Michaelson is sent to rescue his wife, another Actor, who has been taken prisoner by a newly-risen dark lord. However, this dark lord proves to be highly intelligent, capable and formidable, pushing Michaelson and his Caine alter-ego to the limits of their intelligence and endurance to defeat him...if defeat is even an applicable concept.

Heroes Die is a rollicking adventure novel but also a thoughtful book musing on themes such as volition, willpower, violence, entertainment, responsibility and the struggle of the individual against the masses. Its sequel, Blade of Tyshalle (2001), is considerably larger, more complex and delves into these issues in a much darker, bleaker and more complex manner. Caine Black Knife (2008) is a more back-to-basics adventure which features both a new adventure for Caine on Overworld and flashes back to his oft-referenced greatest triumph, retelling that story as a tragedy and trauma. Caine's Law (2012), probably one of the most mind-bending genre novels ever written, forces the reader to reappraise the entire series from its core concepts outwards.

The Acts of Caine sequence remains somewhat obscure, but is highly influential. Scott Lynch and John Scalzi are among the biggest fans of the series, the former citing it as key reference work whilst writing The Lies of Locke Lamora.

The Darkness That Comes Before

There are few works of fantasy that inspire both such admiration and praise and hatred and bile as R. Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse sequence. This sequence consists of three sub-series: the Prince of Nothing trilogy (2004-06), the Aspect-Emperor quartet (2009-17) and a forthcoming duology which will wrap the story up.

On its surface, the series is about the arising of the Chosen One. The nations of the Three Seas are gripped by conflict as the Inrithi church calls a grand crusade - the Holy War - to travel a thousand miles across harsh wilderness to destroy the heathen Fanim and take back the holy city of Shimeh. Of course, they are unaware that the legendary Consult (who once almost destroyed the world by summoning a nihilistic force of destruction known as the No-God),  have emerged from millennia in hiding and are now plotting to destroy the world as they know it. It falls to four unlikely figures to save the day: Drusas Achamian, a Mandate wizard and scholar aware of the return of the Consult; Cnaiur urs Skiotha, a formidably cunning "barbarian" warrior and self-proclaimed "Most violent of all men"; Esmenet, a prostitute whose low birth, caste and station has prevented her formidable intelligence and will from being used to its full benefit; and Anasurimbor Kellhus, a mysterious monk from the Ancient North who sees the Holy War as a tool he can use to his own ends.

As the initial trilogy unfolds and Kellhus becomes aware of the threat of the Consult and the No-God, he begins taking command of the Holy War and moulding it into a weapon against the true enemy of humanity, but in the process alienates his would-be friend and ally Achamian. It is only at the end of the trilogy that Achamian realises that Kellhus may indeed be the only person capable of saving the world, but is also a ruthless, amoral being whose thought processes are not quite human. The sequel trilogy, The Aspect-Emperor, picks up twenty years later and sees Kellhus (whose powers are now godlike) leading another crusade - the Great Ordeal - against the Consult, an apparently laudable pre-emptive strike against the enemy before they can resurrect the No-God, but one that goes horribly wrong.

The combined series is unusual for its intelligence and its dwelling on philosophical concepts, as well as its inversion of fantasy tropes, well-written action sequences, spectacular magic and the prevalence of religious metaphysics on the world and characters. It's also been criticised for its graphic sexual imagery and violence (most of it against men, it has to be said) and its perceived sexism (the world of Earwa is based on Biblical notions of original sin and women are not well-treated before Kellhus's rise to power). Heavily influenced by Dune, The Lord of the Rings and the history of both the Crusades and Alexander the Great's empire, it's not quite like anything else in the genre, both for good and bad.

The Sundering

Jacqueline Carey is best-known for her trilogy of trilogies set in a fantasised alternate-history version of France called Terre d'Ange, starting with Kushiel's Dart (2001). But in 2004 and 2005 she published a very long novel split into two volumes called The Sundering (comprising Banewreaker and Godslayer).

The Sundering is, pretty much, The Lord of the Rings as retold from the POV of the Witch-King of Angmar. In this case our protagonist is Tanaros Blacksword, reviled for murdering his king and joining the armies of the dark demigod Satoris the Banewreaker. However, less well-known is that Tanaros's king had seduced and impregnated Tanaros's wife and was a ruthless and unjust ruler. As the series unfolds it is suggested that the "good guys" aren't really that good and that the wizard Malthus (Carey's Gandalf analogue) is manipulative and amoral. The duology is heavily concerned with the idea of morality as a sliding scale rather than a binary choice between good and evil, and the notion that history is written and justified by the winners.

Some of the ideas in The Sundering have been explored independently in more recent works, most notably Joe Abercrombie's First Law universe which likewise features a Gandalf-like wise mentor who in reality is a brutally ruthless political mastermind and highly uncertain ally. But Carey's series is a much more direct riff on Tolkien and the perceived notions of moral relativism in the fantasy genre.


These were all interesting but relatively obscure and financially less-successful works. Indeed, by the mid-2000s it had been some considerable time since an epic fantasy author had launched and been an immediate big success. Perhaps, some mused, the genre had had its day and was now going into decline? But over the next few years a number of writers debuted whose books were not only critically successful but also sold a very large number of copies, restoring the genre to the top of the bestseller lists.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 16

Despite being part of the genre of the fantastical and the weird, epic fantasy is often rooted in the real. It riffs off real history, real events and real people, sometimes to the point of being set in Europe with just a few names changed, a dragon dropping by and magic being used to blow up Versailles. Other fantasies employ mythologies from real-life sources as their main influences and inspirations
 

Lyonesse

Back in 1950 Jack Vance published The Dying Earth, creating the entire Dying Earth subgenre of fiction (which later gave us The Book of the New Sun and Mark Charan Newton's recent Legends of the Red Sun, amongst others) and the Dungeons and Dragons magic system in one fell swoop. For an encore he wrote many of the greatest science fiction and fantasy novels of all time, such as the Demon Princes series and Big Planet.

Despite both a prolific and greatly accomplished career, Vance had avoided the epic fantasy subgenre. He wasn't one for writing huge battle scenes, or massive doorstop novels, and his sometimes whimsical humour and astonishingly accomplished dialogue seemed better deployed in science fiction. But then he got a good idea for a fantasy series, and ran with it.

The Lyonesse Trilogy was published in three volumes: Suldrun's Garden (1982), The Green Pearl (1985) and Madouc (1990). They are among Vance's longer novels, but still short by modern standards and the entire trilogy is available in omnibus. The trilogy may represent, as a completed work, one of the most accomplished works of fantasy since The Lord of the Rings.

The trilogy is set in the Elder Isles, an archipelago located in what is now the Bay of Biscay, off the west coast of France, the north coast of Spain and the south coast of Ireland. Much of the action takes place on Hybras, the largest of the islands (about the size of Ireland itself), which is falling into war due to the hostile actions of Casmir, King of Lyonesse, who desires to rule the entire island. Casmir's imprisonment of Aillas, one of the heirs to the throne of Troicinet, sets in motion a sequence of events as the young, canny Aillas seeks revenge both for his own part and also to bring justice to the isles.

So far, so standard. But Vance layers in some interesting elements to the story. He disdains violence and instead prefers depicting his characters engaging in formidable battles of wits. He also mirrors the struggle between Casmir and Aillas with the battle between their respective wizardly allies, Tamurello and Shimrod, arbitrated by Murgen, who seeks to preserve the magical balance of power over the isles. The multiple kingdoms of the Elder Isles are depicted well, and in the Ska, violent raiders from the northern isles who consider themselves a breed apart, George R.R. Martin (a huge fan of Vance) may have found the inspiration for his ironborn.

The most notable thing about the series is its clash between the weird and whimsical (fairies, magic, erudite magicians battling with wits and cunning) and the mundane and ordinary (court politics, assassinations), a clash that epic fantasy is uniquely positioned to explore but rarely does so, and certainly not as entertainingly and intelligently as in this trilogy, one of fantasy's masterworks.

Daggerspell

Katharine Kerr began writing Daggerspell, which she envisaged as a short story, in 1982. She completed that same story in 2009 with the publication of the fifteenth novel in the series. The complete saga, The Deverry Cycle, tells the story of a group of people who are reincarnated again and again several times across centuries in the fictional kingdom of Deverry.

Whilst Deverry and its neighbours are fictional, Kerr deeply rooted the story in Celtic history and mythology: Deverry was in fact founded by refugees from our world trying to escape the Roman invasion of Gaul and were transported to the fantasy world by a sorcerer. Whilst the series proceeds in a different direction afterwards, the Celtic roots of the story remain prominent and explored in greater depth by Kerr, who was frustrated with any Western European-leaning fantasy being labelled "Celtic" even when it had nothing to do with that period of history or group of people.

The history of Deverry unfolded over four distinct sub-series: The Deverry Saga (1984-90), The Westlands Saga (1991-94), The Dragon Mage Trilogy (1997-2000) and The Silver Wyrm (2006-09). These moved backwards and forwards in time through the history of Deverry and its neighbours, but Kerr used the conceit of characters who are born and reborn in different bodies and times to explore events of historical interest, as well as the destinies of characters who interact with each other again and again as different people. Combined with some interesting uses of linguistics, these factors make the Deverry Cycle arguably the most significant work of modern epic fantasy to employ Celtic tropes and motifs.

The Lions of Al-Rassan

Guy Gavriel Kay's fantasy career got off to a pretty amazing start: in 1974 he was asked by Christopher Tolkien to assist in the editing of The Silmarillion for publication. In fact, Kay's writing skills were called upon to finesse a couple of chapters that J.R.R. Tolkien had not touched in decades, making him the only person other a Tolkien to work on an officially-published Middle-earth book in a writing capacity (if only of a very minor nature).

After that heady start, Kay worked on his first fantasy trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry, which was published in 1984-86. This concerned a group of students from the University of Toronto who are drawn into Fionavar, the First of All Worlds, which is under threat from dark forces. The experiences they have there are profound and shape who they are, with ripples which extend into the quasi-sequel Ysabel (2007). Although rooted in mythology, the trilogy is more overtly an original fantasy creation.

With his next novel, Tigana (1990), Kay established what would be his more familiar writing style of taking a real location and place in history and writing a novel (not a long series) about how it is changed and influenced by the addition of fantastical elements. Tigana is heavily influenced by Italian history but the fantastical conceit is that the name, history and indeed soul of the country have been magically removed from the mind of its inhabitants. Only a band of rebels led by those who remember the country before its occupation by an enemy power can remember the Tigana that was, and therefore are fighting for the very existence of their nation in a more literal fashion than is normal in fantasy. Kay interlaces themes of love, redemption and tragedy into his story, disdaining (as he usually does) war and violence as the primary means of solving dilemmas.

These themes continued into A Song for Arbonne (1993), a novel which does a similar thing for Renaissance Provence. But it was his 1995 novel, The Lions of Al-Rassan, which solidified things. Kay's works now took place on a world pretty much identical to our own, with each novel mirroring real events more explicitly than previously. The Lions of Al-Rassan, perhaps Kay's greatest masterpiece, expertly combines the stories of El Cid, ibn Ammar and the Reconquista of medieval Spain. Two great warriors, their love for the same woman, their loyalties and their passion for the land of Al-Rassan (also called Esperana) vividly play out across a beautifully-described backdrop.

Kay would continue to explore similar themes in later works: the Sarantine Mosaic duology (1998-2000) is based on Byzantium under Justinian I; The Last Light of the Sun (2004) is centred on England at the time of King Alfred the Great; Under Heaven (2010) is based on the Tang Dynasty of China and its end in the bloody An Shi Rebellion; and River of Stars (2013) is based on Song Dynasty of several centuries later and its transformation in the Jin-Song Wars. His next novel, Children of Earth and Sky, will be published in 2016.

Kay is, arguably, the greatest fantasy writer at taking a real time and place, repurposing it for the purposes of fantasy and doing so whilst still saying something of importance.

The Roof of Voyaging

Published in 1996, The Roof of Voyaging is an unusual fantasy novel. It's the first volume of a trilogy, The Navigator Kings, but Garry Kilworth throws a lot of the normal epic fantasy rules out of the window and moves the action to the other side of the planet (culturally and literally). The action takes place in the Pacific Ocean, deeply rooted in Polynesian mythology and history. This is an epic fantasy which riffs off the legends and past of the myriad peoples of Polynesia, in many ways completely alien to European sensibilities, with scores of gods and a richly-described culture threatened by the invasion of Celts from the south: in a bizarre twist, New Zealand has been swapped out for Britain.

The result is an often barmy and irreverent fantasy trilogy which has huge amounts of fun in doing things completely different to the conventional and tells a hugely entertaining story whilst doing so.

Ash: A Secret History

Published in 2000, Ash: A Secret History is a colossal novel that is part historical novel, part fantasy, part science fiction, part modern thriller and completely bizarre. It's set in France in 1476 and starts off chronicling the misadventures of the Lion Azure, a mercenary company led by Ash. Ash is mired in a political attempt to remove her from command of the mercenaries (a female warrior captain setting uncomfortable precedents) but this is soon superseded when the armies of Carthage invade Europe en mass from the south. In another storyline set in the present, bemused historians are trying to decipher the text of Ash and are constantly bewildered about references to things that never happened.

The result is a novel deeply mired in the traditions of historical and epic fantasy - battles, sieges, political skullduggery - but which brings on board influences from science fiction, alternate history and weird fantasy in an unusual but highly compelling blend.

Kushiel's Dart

Published in 2001, Kushiel's Dart was the debut novel by Jacqueline Carey. It's an interesting blend of genres, mixing some epic fantasy tropes with different cultural groups and religions battling over a continent, with alternate history: the continent is Europe, although the country names and history are different. The books also employ a lot of eroticism, with politics and warfare often assisted (or negated) by seduction or desire on the part of the players involved.

There are nine books in the series (collectively called Kushiel's Legacy), divided into three trilogies (the Phedre, Imriel and Moirin series), spanning over a hundred years in the history of Terre D'Ange (a fantasised version of France) and its neighbours.

The Cardinal's Blades/His Majesty's Dragon

More recently, fantasy has played around with much more straightforward and dramatic variations to real-world history to create something interesting. Two prominent recent fantasy series used much more recent historical periods as their base setting, but with some dragons thrown in to spice things up.

French author Pierre Pevel's Les Lames du Cardinal (Cardinal's Blades) trilogy (2007-10) is set in 1633 Paris and sees an irregular group of soldiers and investigators re-constituted as an elite, deniable group working directly for the formidable Cardinal Richelieu of France. Historical events such as the Thirty Years' War play a role, but the series deviates from history due to the presence and existence of dragons, formidably dangerous (if rare) creatures. The books mix fantasy tropes deriving from the existence of the dragons with swashbuckling derring-do, sword fights in the back alleys of Paris and political intrigue between Richelieu and his enemies.

Far better known is Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which spans nine novels (2006-16), starting with His Majesty's Dragon. The series has a fairly straightforward premise - it's the Napoleonic Wars "BUT WITH DRAGONS" - which the author initially seems to treat simplistically, but then engages with in more depth as the series continues. The books feature both Britain and France deploying dragon mounts as weapons of war and means of transportation during the war, but their mutual use of dragons creates a stalemate with the war more or less proceeding as it did in real life. Variations from established history occur when African dragons are used to end the slave trade (with devastating effects) and it is discovered that the Chinese employ dragons as equals and even superiors. The use of dragons in this setting is initially absorbed into the historical status quo but is later used to spin history off in different directions.

The use of real history and mythology in fantasy would continue, and one author would take those inspirations to create the longest and most successful, outright epic fantasy since J.R.R. Tolkien.

UNFETTERED gets UK book deal

Fantasy author (and well-known fantasy webmaster) Shawn Speakman's fantasy anthology Unfettered has been picked up by Orbit Books for a UK release next year.

 
Unfettered features short stories by Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, Jacqueline Carey, Tad Williams, Naomi Novik, Peter Brett, R.A. Salvatore, Daniel Abraham and Carrie Vaughn, amongst many others. It was released last year in the United States to a good reception. Speakman created the book to help pay for his medical bills after suffering from cancer, with the writers making money back from foreign rights sales.

The UK edition of Unfettered will launch on 20 February 2014. Speakman is also working on a sequel to the book, currently untitled but planned for release in 2015.

Godslayer by Jacqueline Carey

The land of Urulat is about to see the end of a conflict thousands of years old. The machinations of Satoris the Sower have been exposed and the would-be King of the West, Aracus Altorus, advised by the Wise Counsellor Malthus, has raised a mighty host to assault Darkhaven and rescued his beloved, Cerelinde of the Ellylon. It falls to Satoris' most loyal servants, the Three, to prepare his defence. But whilst great armies ready for the clash, it falls to two of the humble desert-people to find their way into Darkhaven and strike the blow that will render Satoris truly vulnerable.


Godslayer is the second and final novel in The Sundering, a duology that studies and subverts the traditional epic fantasy paradigm as established by Tolkien. Like its forebear, Banewreaker, Godslayer is an epic tragedy, closely based on events and characters from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, but at every turn analysing deeply every character's motivation. As Satoris ponders, does it matter that you are not evil if everyone else believes that you are?

This premise allows Carey to examine many themes and ideas, such as propaganda (Malthus/Gandalf as a sort-of Goebbels for the 'good guys' is an interesting take), destiny and the cyclical nature of history: just as Morgoth was cast down but his servant Sauron was overlooked, allowing him to return later, so Satoris has his own lieutenants who stand poised to inherit his mantle. These ideas are rooted in strong characterisation, particularly of Tanaros and Cerelinde, though other characters also come to the fore.

Godslayer suffers from some minor issues. The story is inherently predictable, once you realise what Carey is doing. Also problematic is that The Sundering is one novel split in two for publication (itself appropriate, since The Lord of the Rings was originally published as three volumes; the fact that Carey tells as epic a story in considerably less pages may itself before a comment on the fantasy genre), meaning that the two books do not stand well alone. Since both are available now and you can read from one into the next without a problem, this is not as much of an issue as when the book was newly-released.

On the plus side, this is a clever and thoughtful conclusion to the series. Through authors such as Bakker and Erikson, epic fantasy has of late been more and more interrogating itself and asking hard questions about its underlying assumptions, but Carey does the same here a lot more concisely. Carey also delivers a story that is an emotionally powerful tragedy. The opposing factions cannot agree on anything and good men on both sides die needlessly as a result of mistakes made thousands of years earlier. The reader becomes as frustrated as the characters do at the ongoing carnage that is only happening at the whim of the proud and long-absent gods.

Godslayer (****) is a worthy conclusion to this duology that questions the conservative nature of much epic fantasy and finds it wanting, as well as delivering a powerful and tragic tale in its own right. The book is available now in the USA and on import in the UK.

Banewreaker by Jacqueline Carey

Long Ages ago, the Seven Shapers forged the world in accordance with the will of their creator, out of whose death they were born. However, Satoris the Sower refused the command of Haomane Firstborn and was named a traitor. For many long Ages Haomane and Satoris struggled, until the world was Sundered. The other six Shapers now dwell in the uttermost west, whilst Satoris finds himself constantly assailed by their servants in Urulat.


Tanaros, one of the Three and Satoris's most stalwart servant, is given an important mission. He must prevent Haomane's Prophecy from coming to pass by seizing the Lady of the Ellylon, Cerelinde, before she can marry the Aracus Altorus, the rightful King of the West. But this kidnapping itself may have set in motion the events that Satoris has long tried to avoid...

Read at a purely surface level, the plot precis of Banewreaker (the first book in the Sundering duology) sounds more than a bit familiar. But this is deliberate: in these two novels Jacqueline Carey launches a revisionist broadside at the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. At a very simple level, this is the story of The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (though chronologically mixed-up) as told from Morgoth's point of view (and, more overtly, the Witch-King of Angmar's, though Sauron also plays a role).

Of course, Carey reworks the names, concepts, races and ideas a fair bit so she doesn't get sued into oblivion by the Tolkien Estate, but these changes are hardly impenetrable, and it's still straightforward enough to work out who is who from the Tolkien mythos. At the same time, Carey imbues her characters with enough depth that they stand on their own two feet and after a while you start to forget the artistic intent behind the series in favour of its own narrative and storyline.

The Sundering is essentially an 'epic tragedy', and it's telling that each book opens with a quote from Paradise Lost. The duology is set in a world where there are two distinct sides, the 'dark' forces led by a fallen deity and consisting of an army of trolls led by 'fallen' Men, and a 'light' side led by stalwart heroes, noble Ellylon (elves with the serial numbers filed off) and a plucky innocent hero who has to take a magical trinket of enormous power (in this case, slightly oddly, a bucket of water) into the heart of enemy territory. The 'good guys' are also advised by a wise and powerful wizard who at one point undergoes an unexpected transformation. The story, spun by the wizard and his cronies, is that Satoris wrecked the world through greed and avarice, and continues to be responsible for all that is evil in Urulat. However, Satoris claims that he only desired freedom of voice and expression and was brutally supressed by the supposedly wise Haomane, who has incessantly pursued Satoris out of vengeance ever since.

The reader is invited to make their own judgement on the truth of the matter, mostly through the character of Cerelinde who is initially a paid-up supporter of Team White Hat. Arriving at Satoris's fortress of Darkhaven, she finds it guarded by fell trolls and maintained by an army of ugly and twisted minions...but the trolls turn out to be honourable and brave warriors, and the minions are outcasts turned out from the world of Men and Ellylon who have been given shelter by Satoris and are treated kindly. As the book progresses, Cerelinde finds herself questioning her own rote acceptance of the written version of history, but at the same time Satoris and his own minions, attacked once again by their enemies, find it difficult to resist becoming what Haomane's PR makes them out to be, evil and destructive monsters.

It's a clever idea for a book, going beyond the mild revisionist intent of Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (where he merely gave his dark lord a motivation, but didn't attempt to justify the evil he'd still carried out), but the book cannot survive on its intent alone. As an individual work with its own storyline and characters, Banewreaker is satisfying and well-written, with Carey managing the trick of echoing Tolkien's prose style without slavishly following it (and thankfully not even attempting any poems). Events build to a tragic conclusion as an epic battle is fought between two sides where both are in the right and in the wrong, and the stage is set for a bigger confrontation to come in the concluding volume of the story, Godslayer (although the actual ending of the book is a little random, the result of this being one long novel split in two and not two separately-written instalments).

Banewreaker (****) is an intelligent and refreshing take on the traditional epic fantasy novel and is a well-written and enjoyable story in its own right. It is available now in the USA and on import in the UK.