![]() ![]() The two have known each other for decades - or possibly even millennia, as time has fractured in the cataclysmic backstory and now passes slower in some parts of the empire than others - but their relationship has previously only ever been professional. ![]() ![]() Cliopher Mdang, personal secretary to the emperor of the world, spends the first quarter of the text escorting his liege on an incognito holiday, the result of a breach-of-protocol invitation blurted out upon a stroke of insight about how lonely the other man must be in his peerless existence under elaborate courtly taboos, unable to be touched or looked directly in the eye. I am honestly not even sure that I would say it has a plot, although events do gradually unfold in support of the central character arc: a quietly effective middle-aged civil servant belatedly earning (or realizing he already has) the love and admiration of his colleagues, his far-off relatives, and his boss. But this self-published 2019 work is remarkable in any number of ways, each more endearingly quaint than the last. It’s rare for a 900-page fantasy tome to feel so cozy, let alone to forgo any significant romance or acts of violence throughout its duration. ![]() The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire #1)Ī wonderful warm hug of a novel, and probably my top read of the year. ![]()
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