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From his very first books, the trilogy known as the Fionavar Tapestry, Guy Gavriel Kay was recognized as one of the world's finest and most innovative writers working with the fantasy tradition. In later works he has taken on, with striking success, an alternative history of Europe, which reached a pinnacle with 2004's
The Lost Light of the Sun. Set at the hinge moment of Britain's Alfred the Great's enlightened reign (he's known as Aeldred in Kay's parallel Europe),
Lost Light is a drama of cultural clash and change in a world shadowed by the presence of faerie but deeply engaged with human questions of ethics and honour.
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In the often formulaic world of fantasy fiction, Guy Gavriel Kay stands out as an innovative and challenging writer. He not only pushes the genre's limits with his unique blend of high fantasy and historical fiction, he also expands his own boundaries as a writer by constantly exploring new directions.
The Last Light of the Sun is no exception, as Kay leaves the courtly world of his recent novels for a harsh northern land populated with marauding sea raiders, grim kings struggling to establish some semblance of civilization, and a slowly dying faerie world.
The Last Light of the Sun invokes the Britain of the Old English sagas, in which community is built upon honour and loyalty, and the end of the world is always but a battle away.
The book follows a large cast of characters from three different societies: the Viking stand-in Erlings, the Celtic Cyngael, and the Anglo Saxon-like Anglcyn. The three groups clash repeatedly and become more closely intertwined in each meeting, as characters fight, fall in love, and die, and complex family stories and quests are played out across generations and different landscapes. What makes the book truly remarkable is Kay's honest, unsentimental storytelling style. The characters in The Last Light of the Sun are real people, not stock fantasy characters, and the plot often takes unexpected, unconventional twists, resulting in a chain of events that more closely resembles real history than romantic tales. The Last Light of the Sun is one of Kay's bleaker works, largely because it's also one of his most real. But it is still an epic tale, and like the best epics it depicts not only heroes and mighty battles but also patterns of loss and change. It is a world upon which the sun is truly setting, but it is also a world about to be reborn into a new era, and Kay tells its story like the best bards of old. --Peter Darbyshire