Return to Kitai

Those who have have followed the career of Guy Gavriel Kay long enough know that, since his last book came out just about two years ago, this is roughly when drips and drabs of information about his next book should start showing up. And, right on cue, we get some details. GGK is returning to Kitai, the fantastical medieval China which was the setting of the brilliant Under Heaven!

Guy Gavriel Kay’s new novel is once more inspired by Chinese history, this time during the Song Dynasty, almost four centuries after the story told in his bestselling Under Heaven. The dazzling elements of the Song – cultural brilliance, vicious political rivalries, warfare against nomadic peoples, court mandarins versus the military – are rich ground for Kay’s unique blending of fantasy and themes of history. Vivid among a large cast, a young man with a dream of regaining the empire’s lost ‘rivers and mountains’ and a brilliant woman trying to shape a space for herself outside the ‘inner quarters’, where women are expected to live out their lives, confront the challenges and dangers of a world in turmoil. The Song Dynasty’s legacy is prominent in the way Westerners imagine Chinese history to this day and Kay weaves a story that captivates on both an epic scale and within the intimate lives of his characters.

Apparently this book is due in 2013. It’ll be a long year! (But that will give me time to re-read the GGK books I have, as yet, not re-read: Last Light of the Sun, Ysabel, and Under Heaven.)

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