If ever you wanted to know what literary fantasy looks like, this is it. But if you’re looking for something deeper, a painting in words, if you like, where every tiny moment, every glance or touch or word is a perfectly nuanced brush-stroke, this is the book for you. There is perhaps only one moment that qualifies in the whole book. If you’re looking for a book filled with action, or any action at all, you won’t find it here. It’s not so much what happens that’s interesting, but how: the almost imperceptible inching towards an accommodation, the delicate dance around each other. He thinks she’s a spoiled rich brat.Īnd herein lies the whole story: two very different people, from vastly different backgrounds, who have to learn not only to work together, as healers with diametrically opposed methods, but also to live together under the basic conditions of the caravan. Keifon is an army-trained medic from Yanwei, deeply religious but with his own demons, assigned to be her partner.
Sent to a foreign land to repay her training in service to others, she joins a caravan of merchants and craftspeople travelling through the towns and villages. Agna is a young healer from a rich family in Nessiny, trained to use magic to heal. They have histories and personalities, they have weaknesses and strengths, they have beliefs, hopes and dreams, fears and uncertainties. No, not characters, these are real, flesh-and-blood people, who happen to live in the pages of a book. OK, I hear you saying, so what the **** IS in it, then? People, that’s what. There are no witches, werewolves, vampires. No dragons, either, sadly (every fantasy book should have dragons, in my opinion, but there you go). There are no orcs, dwarves, elves or goblins. There’s no quest, no named sword, no moustache-twirling villain, no prophecy.
It’s not about finding the lost heir to the kingdom. So what’s it about? Well, let me tell you first what it’s not about. So this is a book that nobody has ever heard of. But this book is special: I came across it on a forum where the author lamented that she’d only sold… no, let’s not put a number on it.
Yes, yes, I know I specialise in unusual books not for me the dull old treadmill of mainstream popular works.
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