All the Seas of the World

Kay's evocation of a world that is almost, but not quite, the Renaissance Mediterranean is terrifically atmospheric, and he peoples it with characters you care about and believe in. Perhaps the most elegant fantasist working today, he marshals events on intimate personal and global political scales and walks us through their effects and reverberations in wonderfully smooth prose. No one else produces work like this in the genre and this new novel is to be celebrated.