Author : Guy Gaveriel Kay
Description : A quick warning for all of you into the more visceral, fast-reading fantasy authors... this book may not be for you. Tigana is one of those rare fantasy novels that transcends the genre to become a pure work of literature. Compared to most modern fantasy authors today, Kay writes very carefully and makes an extra effort to force you to care about all his characters and the situations they find themselves in. This extraordinary novel can force you to redefine your expectations of fantasy writing.Tigana's world is based loosely on Renaissance Italy. The Peninsula of the Palm has been split down the middle by two separate conquerors from larger countries. The conquerors were able to subjugate the peninsula easily due to the rivalries between the seven formerly independent provinces of the Palm. The final province to be conquered, Tigana, managed to kill the son of one of the tyrants. In a fit of wrath, the tyrant descends upon Tigana and crushes it utterly. However, he also takes the extra step of erasing the country's name from the minds of every citizen on the Palm except for the survivors of Tigana. Non-citizens cannot hear or speak the name; instead, Tigana is renamed after its most bitter rival in the old provincial struggles. Years later, a small group of Tiganese rebels begin a campaign to bring their name back to the Palm and expel both tyrants...
And this just doesn't convey the subtleties and character interaction the plot has. The use of Italian linguistics and political situations gives the book an atmosphere of plausibility but doesn't ram it down our throats (as Jordan's Aes Sedai mythos or Goodkind's descriptions of the Mother Confessor's office tend to do).
The characters, though, are what drive the book. Even those characters that only make a brief appearance are startlingly well-crafted and at times even touching. An episode early in the book which examines very closely the relationship between a proud, authoritarian father and his doomed son moved me to tears- and it happened in the first one hundred and fifty pages.
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