Written on the Dark, by Guy Gavriel Kay

It’s always a happy happy day when Guy Gavriel Kay releases a new book. His latest novel, Written on the Dark, continues to expand about the nearly-our-world-but-not-quite history he’s been developing over many, many novels (if you consider it a series, even though it wasn’t specifically written as one, this cycle now contains eight novels, and I wrote about the experience of rereading the first seven at the end of this year-end post in 2023).

This time, we are in Ferrieres, a country that closely parallels France in our world, and a country that, like France in the 1300s, is locked in a hundred-years’-war with its neighbour. A king very like Henry V is about to invade, but that’s only the backdrop of the story. The foreground is the story of a young poet who unexpectedly gets jarred out of his quiet life and thrown into the world of much greater events and much more powerful people. This is Guy Gavriel Kay at his best — using a historical moment infused with just a light touch of fantasy and magic, to explore the differences that ordinary people can make in great moments. It’s haunting, evocative, and lovely (and gives an interesting twist to that world’s version of Joan of Arc, too!)