Wow! An epic book to have just finished, in its length and its content.
My review will follow, in the meanwhile here is another's view on this and Kay's other works
http://brightweavings.com/the-other-side-of-the-mirror-tigana/ ( )

One of the finest novels I've read. Kay beautifully explores the power, love and grief of history and memory without it ever slowing down the page-turning thrill of following a small resistance movement on a peninsula ruled by two invading tyrants. Kay has throughout his novels always had an admirable ability to wed heightened sentiment to mundane realism, and that, too, is on splendid display here, the sixth (and so far my favourite) novel I've read by him. ( )

Summary: Nice epic fantasy with lots of characters and subplots.

Things I liked: Last third of the book brought together many threads and characters and subplots in a way that had me turning each page with glee. It felt so intricate and well planned.

Things I thought could have been improved:

Female characters: The women in the book all seemed to have a reasonably puerile attitude to sex and relationships. I found this distracting and would have preferred for it to be left out altogether or be done better.

Highlight: The final battle the death of Brandin and the Fool ( )

I hate it when you notice one thing and then can't divorce that judgment from the rest of the book.

For instance: all of the women are beautiful, all have a rather extended sex scene (maybe not Alais). That scene with Catriana in the beginning of the book tainted my view of her for the rest of the book, even though she never slept with anybody else. Which is part of her character, but I didn't like it. Catriana comes the closest to having a reason to exist in the book besides her romantic relation to a man.

I also still haven't resolved the slavery thing, I'll keep thinking on that for a while. I may also be too influenced by modern takes on slavery, since this book is almost 30 years old now.


GGK's prose is as lovely as always, and I still appreciate the moral ambiguity of all the characters and their motivations. You just want to revel in how tragic the characters are for a few hundred pages. It was more tragic than Lions of Al-Rassan, but one needs that sometimes.


Meaningless gripe: this book is still really expensive on Kindle, and my paperback copy is large (and it's long). Will not fit on a plane when you're strapped for space. ( )

One man sees a riselka: his life forks there.
Two men see a riselka: one of them shall die.
Three men see a riselka: one is blessed, one forks, one shall die.

I finished Tigana about 5mins ago and I would have listened to the entire audiobook uninterrumpted if life didn't get in the way.
I haven't read fantasy this good and that I enjoyed this much in a while. It felt incredibly epic, even though it's not a battle of good vs evil, nor to save the world from some threat, just a small place in a small peninsula in a much larger world.
I loved that the story is about memory. Memory, history and identity are at the root of everything.
The characters are great, I couldn't for the life of me, hate Brandin or consider him a villain. I felt for Dianora too. I wish I could have connected to the prince and the singer as much, but I still enjoyed their quest to reclaim their culture. ( )