Locklands

The first two books of this trilogy were five star reads for me, with a terrific atmosphere, location and brilliantly imaginative magic system. This final volume massively increases the scale and goes full widescreen. Where the earlier books were largely set in one city this one covers a whole continent blighted by war between two impossibly powerful adversaries, and the stakes are about as high as they could possibly be. But for all the epic conflict there's a huge emotional core and the heart of the book is about two relationships, between a father and his son and our hero Sancia and her wife, and it's these that lead to the final satisfaction of the ending. There's an epilogue set after all the dust has settled and it's one of the most powerful and emotional sequences I've read for a long long time.

With this trilogy and the preceding Divine Cities series, RJB has produced some of the best and certainly the most original fantasy novels of the twenty-first century, and he's at the top of my must read list.