Written on the Dark: Feels like Kay’s most elegiac work

Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay

In Written on the Dark (2025), Guy Gavriel Kay returns to his “quarter-turn from our own” world, here shifting time and place to a late-medieval “France” (Ferrieres in Kay’s universe) ruled by a “mad king.” When the king’s brother is killed by the powerful Duke of Barratin and left on the streets of Orane (think Paris), tavern poet Thierry Villar finds himself embroiled in the politics and intrigue of a world he’d never imagined himself part of, as Ferrieres tries to avoid civil war while also attempting to fend off an exterior invasion by the king of the island nation across the channel.


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