Book Author :: Guy Gavriel Kay

Imagine you’re a chef and at your restaurant you only make one meal. It’s beautiful and satisfying and no one’s complaining about the plate of gorgeous food in front of them. In fact, you have plenty of repeat customers, because hey, a lot of people go to restaurants and order the same thing every time. Why venture into the unknown towards probable disappointment?

But no matter how great your one meal is, some of your customers are eventually going to wonder what the dessert menu might look like.

And that analogy is close to where I find myself as a Guy Gavriel Kay fan. I’ve been reading him for close to a decade now and I’m a completist (except his poems, haven’t read those). His books make me cry. They’re lovely and poetic and full of ordinary and extraordinary people alike trying to make good choices when the world doesn’t seem to give them any.

Even as a fan, I’m cognizant that his books tend towards a certain… sameness. He works with archetypes — the poet, the warrior, the artist, the lover, the priest — and continually revisits themes of fate and choice. He does it well, but while reading his latest offering I found myself wondering what else he has to offer.
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A soldier-poet in a world where connections and subtly are everything, Shen Tai expects to lead an ordinary life. After the death of his father, he spends the required two year mourning period burying the bones of a twenty-year-old conflict in the mountains. His father was the former general of the Kitai army, and had spent many an evening lamenting that fruitless battle. No one else could be bothered to bury the dead because the angry ghosts of a hundred thousand men scared them away, but Tai is doing this to honor his dead father, despite the danger, and works those years easing the spirits of the former soldiers into their eternal rest.
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