The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
“To read The Traitor Baru Cormorant is to sink inexorably into a book that should not be anywhere near as absorbing as it is to realize that the white-knuckled grip with which you hold it was provoked by several consecutive pages of loans, taxes and commodity trading. It seems impossible that the economics of a fantasy world should be so viscerally riveting, but they are, and it’s incredible: You think you’re on solid ground right up until you feel that ground closing around your throat.
And Baru Cormorant as a character is magnificent. I found it impossible not to root for her even amid horrors of her making, to grieve with her and for her at various points, to clench my fists in her defense and in desperate need for her to stay whole. There is so much to admire and so much to mourn throughout the building tragedy of this novel.
This is not a happy book. It is not an uplifting book. But it is a crucial, necessary book a book that looks unflinchingly into the self-replicating virus of empire, asks the hardest questions, and dares to answer them.” — NPR.org
