Every so often you come across an author who manages to blend the strands of fantasy and historical fiction into a seamless whole. There are, unfortunately, very few of those in the fantasy world, though authors like George R.R. Martin has come to fame in being able to do so, but if your appetite for the blending of the two genres has been whetted by A Song of Ice and Fire, you should definitely crack open a book by Guy Gavriel Kay.

Kay’s most recent work, Children of Earth and Sky, is set in a universe largely like the Early Modern world that we are familiar with, peopled with a number of competing powers and players, including Seressa (a Venice analogue), Osmanlis (the Ottomans), Obravic (the Holy Roman Empire), Senjan (the Senj), and Dubrava (Dubrovnik). A host of characters both major and minor appear, including a young painter, a renegade nun, a young raider, and a prosperous merchant. Their fates intertwine and break apart and, as a result, the foundations of their world begin to shift.

There is just something haunting and lyrical in Gay’s prose that makes each of his books a genuine pleasure to read. He manages to evoke not just the inner psychology of the characters but also the ethos of the period. We can inhabit, if only for the space of the narrative, a world in many ways utterly unlike our own, governed by different laws and lived by different rules. This was probably more true of the original Sarantine books (given that they take place in Late Antiquity), but the same is still true of this novel, with its world of cut-throat politics and a world trembling on the brink of change. (Perhaps that world isn’t so unlike our own, after all…)

Further, Kay imbues his works (at least all the ones that I have read) with a strand of philosophy. He writes fiction that does and says something, that strives to make us think about the world in a different way. This novel, perhaps more than any other that I have read in recent memory, asks us what it means to exist in the flowing stream of time and history. Very few of the characters are major players in the world’s political sphere–though they are often adjacent to it–but their actions have far-reaching consequences that affect everyone in their world. Kay, and his narrator, clearly wants us to think about how it is that we make sense of both our individual

However, this is not to say that the novel doesn’t also give equal attention to the personal and the romantic. Indeed, there are at least three haunting romances that occur during the course of the novel, and Kay handles the affairs of the heart with the same grace and haunting prose as he does the larger set pieces. It’s a rare book that actually brings me to tears, but I definitely shed more than a few as I read the final pages of Children of Earth and Sky.

Of course, for those who have read his duology The Sarantine Mosaic (comprised of Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors), Children contains a number of fascinating little nuggets. Pero, for example, stumbles upon the remains of the tiny birds that were used by the sorcerer in Sailing to Sarantium as vessels for captured spirits, while the dowager Eudoxia serves as a living reminder of the earth-shattering fall of the splendid city of Sarantium to the invading Osmanlis. Much has changed since Crispin made his fateful voyage, and though the reader remembers him, it would appear that much of what he has created has vanished with time. Time is a river that can wash away even the greatest of art, even a mosaic made by a heartbroken mosaicist looking for redemption in an eastern city.

The only downside to being a fan of Kay’s is that, being such a meticulous craftsman, it takes him a fairly long time to produce a new novel. Fortunately, I’m still working my way through his back catalogue, but once I’m finished with them, I’ll just have to wait patiently until he once again allows us a glimpse into his endlessly fertile imagination.