Much, much too late with this list, I know.
Silver Princess, Golden Knight — Sharon Green
I took a punt on this, from an author I hadn’t heard anything before and was disappointed. A princess gets into trouble with the law and her father’s solution is to marry her off through a contest. She enters herself but of course falls in love with her main rival. At the end it turns out all her struggles were for nothing. The author really seemed to hate her heroine.
The Magicians’ Guild — Trudi Canavan
I was disappointed with this novel, as it looked like it was possibly going to challenge the class assumptions built into most epic fantasy novels, but it didn’t.
Rome and the Sword — Simon James
A military history of Rome, as told through the swords it used. An interesting conceit and a decent history.
Last Letters from Hav / Hav of the Myrmidons — Jan Morris
The original was written in 1985, a series of dispatches from a fictional city state located somewhere in the nebulous reaches of far Eastern Europe; the second was written in 2005, updating Hav’s story. The 1985 Hav was chaotic, a mixture of the histories and powers that had shaped it. The 2005 version was streamlined, totalitarian in a way you recognise from actually existing countries.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters — Jason E. Stearns
A nuanced and interesting history of the wars in Zaire/the Congo.
Silence in Solitude — Melissa Scott
The second in the Silence trilogy, about a woman space pilot in a far future where physics is very different from our own and her struggles to find the lost road to Earth.
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