The Traitor Baru Cormorant
Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant, published in 2015, is one of the fiercest, smartest fantasy debuts of its decade and a novel that took the political-intrigue subgenre into entirely new territory. Baru is a small girl on Taranoke, a peaceful island whose chief exports are sugar, salt, and a culture in which a child can have multiple fathers. When the Masquerade arrives, the island is colonized so politely it barely registers as conquest. Within a generation, Taranoke's customs are pathologized, its currency replaced, and one of Baru's fathers disappeared. Baru, marked as gifted, is plucked into a Masquerade school and trained to serve the empire that broke her. As an adult she is dispatched as Imperial Accountant to the rebellious, snowbound duchy of Aurdwynn, where her brilliance with finance, taxation, and ledgers becomes the leverage by which she will rise high enough, she hopes, to one day strike at the empire's heart. Dickinson writes economics like other fantasy writers write swords. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is a slow, devastating novel about the price of ambition, the corrosive logic of empire, and the unbearable cost of the long con. Its final pages have made it one of the most argued-about books in modern fantasy.
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When Falcrest annexes the island of Taranoke and rewrites its laws, young Baru Cormorant decides she will dismantle the empire from inside. The novel follows her from school to a posting as Imperial Accountant of the cold rebel duchy of Aurdwynn, where she is sent to break a revolt for the empire.
Seth Dickinson's Masquerade has three published books: The Traitor Baru Cormorant, The Monster Baru Cormorant, and The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. A fourth book to complete the planned tetralogy is forthcoming.
Yes. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is widely cited as a defining grimdark fantasy of the 2010s. Its focus on imperial economics and political infiltration distinguishes it from sword-and-blood grimdark like Joe Abercrombie.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant was written by Seth Dickinson, published in 2015 by Tor Books.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant is 401 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Traitor Baru Cormorant takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant is a standalone novel by Seth Dickinson, not part of a series.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
