Review – The Winter Road by Adrian Selby
This is not your father (or mother)’s epic fantasy. In fact, this may be as far from epic fantasy as possible. This is more like a poster child for grimdark or sword and sorcery, and it is (mostly) glorious.
Life in The Circle is hard. The people live in clans (think Germanic tribes), sometimes warring amongst themselves, but mostly just struggling to survive. Winters are harsh, and the land is rife with bandits. Trading takes time and the risks are high, but the clans need each other to survive.
Teyr Amondsen has a dream. She wants to build a road through The Circle, linking the clans and making trade easier. But life is harder for a woman, even a highly-regarded mercenary-turned trader such as Teyr. No one believes she can pull it off, but she manages to persuade her clan leader to give her a chance to talk with the other clans. She sets off on a mission to make the others in The Circle believe her dream can become a reality. However, en route she learns of a warlord from the opposite end of the land uniting the clans by whatever means necessary, and he stands in the way of Teyr and her dream.
The author has created a harsh, uncompromising world here. A land of rocks and swamps, dangerous forests and villages whose people live almost in constant fear. The warriors take fightbrews that give them almost super-human powers. Like drugs, these fightbrews need to be created with skill by drudahs, or the side effects can be costly to the user. Battles are realistic and visceral, and no one is guaranteed to make it to the end of the book.
What little joy we see, we see through the eyes of Teyr, who tells us the tale, and she has little to be joyful about. She is a terrific MC, more human than most humans we know, tough as nails, smart and calls a spade a spade. But the amount of abuse she goes through to achieve her goals would have most of us crying for our mommies. Sure, she is a ferocious fighter, but she is kind and loyal to those who reciprocate, and she is well-loved by those who know her well.
So I did say “(almost) glorious. Something that may put people off is the writing style. It’s a harsh world, so there is no flowery speech here (these are an uneducated people, at least by modern perspectives), although personally, I find it masterfully done, even if it took me a few chapters to get into the vibe. The book is split into three parts, with the first flipping between ‘now’ and ‘then’ which also takes getting used to, but makes sense as a writing tool once you come to terms with it. The second is all in the now, and is as exciting as any novel I’ve read this year, racing along at a blistering pace. The final book seems at odds with the rest, and is a series of letters (as in missives), but I don’t believe that anyone who enjoys the first two parts of the book will give up in disgust. It is basically the ‘after.’
If you enjoy godlike heroes who risk their lives to save the world from a great evil, this is not for you. If you want humans trying to make their small part of the world a little better, and needing to take on other humans with different perspectives, then go get this now!
A dark and intriguing 5/5 stars.
