Tigana

Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, published in 1990, is one of the most beloved single-volume epic fantasies ever written and the novel that established Kay as the genre's great elegist. The Peninsula of the Palm, modeled loosely on Renaissance Italy, has been conquered and divided between two foreign sorcerer-tyrants. One of them, Brandin of Ygrath, lost his beloved son in the conquest of a small province called Tigana and laid down a sorcerous curse that erased the very name of the place from the world. Anyone not born inside its borders cannot hear the word Tigana when it is spoken aloud. As the novel opens, almost twenty years have passed since the conquest. A traveling musical troupe, secretly led by the exiled prince Alessan, plots a quiet, complicated revolution to free not just Tigana but the whole Palm, and to give back to the dead the name they took from the living. Kay tells the story through a panoramic cast: the half-remembering peasant girl Dianora, who has placed herself in Brandin's bed for reasons she cannot fully explain; the impulsive young revolutionary Devin; the wizards, the kings, and the players caught between empire and homeland. Tigana is a meditation on memory, occupation, complicity, and what it costs to fight for a country whose existence is being unmade in real time. It remains essential reading.