All the Seas of the World by Guy Gavriel Kay
Returning triumphantly to the brilliantly evoked near-Renaissance world of A Brightness Long Ago and Children of Earth and Sky , international bestselling author Guy Gavriel Kay deploys his signature ‘quarter turn to the fantastic’ to tell a story of vengeance, power, and love. On a dark night along a lonely stretch of coast a small ship sends two people ashore. Their purpose is assassination. They have been hired by two of the most dangerous men alive to alter the balance of power in the world. If they succeed, the consequences will affect the destinies of empires, and lives both great and small. One of those arriving at that beach is a woman abducted by corsairs as a child and sold into years of servitude. Having escaped, she is trying to chart her own course—and is bent upon revenge. Another is a seafaring merchant who still remembers being exiled as a child with his family from their home, for their faith, a moment that never leaves him. In what follows, through a story both intimate and epic, unforgettable characters are immersed in the fierce and deadly struggles that define their time. All the Seas of the World is a page-turning drama that also offers moving reflections on memory, fate, and the random events that can shape our lives—in the past, and today. Read more
How to describe Guy Gavriel Kay's books? He is a genre of his own. His novels live somewhere between fantasy and historical fiction. He has borrowed the words "a quarter turn to the fantastic" from a reviewer to describe it. The events and many of the characters are borrowed from real and carefully researched history. They are, nevertheless, Kay's creations. Here is some of what he has to say about his unique approach (and by the way, I am using "unique" in its strict sense -- to the best of my knowledge, no one else writes fiction like Kay). He explains: "Why isn’t the book set in a ‘real’ place, in our own Europe? Why do I have Seressa instead of Venice and Batiara for Italy? Why a rebel leader named Skandir, instead of Albania’s great Skanderbeg, who inspired my character? "I found that I liked what all this allowed me to do. I could work with history but tighten focus on themes. I could have my characters do and think and be what I wanted them to, because they were not the real people. Readers who knew the history would see the riffing involved, those who didn’t would either not miss it or – a bonus, for me – might be moved to do some non-fiction reading of their own, after." --From On the Strengths of Fiction Done as Near-History The main characters of All the Seas are the Kindath (Jewish) merchant/corsair Rafel ben Natan and the Jaddite (Christian) assassin Nadia. As the story opens, they are on the Sea near the Ashar (Muslim) city of Abeneven (Algiers, perhaps?) preparing an assassination. (That's in the publisher's blurb for the book, so I'm not counting it as a spoiler.) Rafel and Nadia are small players, but they become caught up in the affairs of the powerful. Thus we get a tale of political intrigue and war. I found all the characters believable and interesting. All the Seas takes place on and around the Middle Sea (the Mediterranean) of an Earthlike world that has two moons. Thus, it is fantasy. However, it is very close to the Mediterranean region of our world. It is, in fact, the same world in which many of Kay's other novels are set, from The Lions of Al-Rassan through A Brightness Long Ago. If you are familiar with European history, you will recognize many of the places and people here described under aliases, e.g. Seressa and Skandir as named in the quote above. If you have also read other books by Kay, some of the characters and events alluded to will be familiar. For instance, although Jehane, the physician of The Lions of Al-Rassan, is long dead at the time of All the Seas, some of the characters spot a worn statue of her in a public square. This raises the question of whether you should read Kay's other books before reading All the Seas. The first answer is easy: Yes!, you should definitely read Kay's other books, because they are VERY good. But you don't need to read them in order. They are written to stand alone, and they do. If you have time on your hands and plan to read all the books, I would advise reading them in publication order, so that you can appreciate Kay's gradual world-building. In fact, I plan to go back and re-read some of them now. I said that All the Seas is fantasy, and indeed, that is how the Library of Congress classifies most of Kay's work. However, All the Seas will not feel like an typical fantasy novel to you. There is almost no magic (and the smidgeon there is plays only a minor role in the plot). The military technology is realistic for the time in history portrayed. (This can be fixed fairly accurately because the events take place five years after the fall of Sarantium (Constantinpole) to the Osmanlis (Ottomans). In our world Constantinople fell in 1453, so the era of All the Seas corresponds roughly to mid-fifteenth century.) I received an advance copy of the paperback edition of All the Seas of the World in a Goodreads giveaway. This gift came with no obligation on my part -- what I have written is what I really think.
ASIN -> B09CYNZLSV Publisher -> Berkley (May 17, 2022) Publication date -> May 17, 2022 Language -> English File size -> 4394 KB Text-to-Speech -> Enabled Screen Reader -> Supported Enhanced typesetting -> Enabled
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