Yep, I’ve been quiet on here long enough to read all four of these …
Sabaa Tahir‘s debut novel, An Ember in the Ashes (2015), starts the series, and is followed by A Torch in the Night (2016), A Reaper at the Gates (2018), and A Sky Beyond the Storm (2020).
There is something oddly, irresistibly, compelling in Tahir’s writing and world. It’s a combination of a very creative–if slightly chilling–re-creation of an ancient empire loosely parallel to Rome, a collection of well-drawn characters, and enough page-turning suspense to keep you hooked through the rougher bits.
There is a lot to unpack here, and it evolves nicely across the books. We start with a militaristic, brutally unforgiving Emperor with a training school from hell designed to feed his needs and a popular resistance that is out-manned at every turn. By the end, we have added a supernatural creature responsible for the transition of souls from life to death, a series of revelations about our main characters’ lineage(s), and a battle fought by humans as proxies for both evil and good spirits, all with a loosely Middle-Eastern flair.
It’s a lot.
And, somehow, Tahir keeps the energy up. There are some highly predictable and near cliché plot points, and the usual genre difficulties with sexual attraction (it feels like the border between bodice-ripper and speculative fiction may need some tightening, and this from someone profoundly opposed to boundaries between genres), but in the end what stays with you are the moments of peril and (some) triumph, and, for me at least, the fascinating authorial choices of how to handle the series’ initial protagonists.
This last is part of the joy of reading as well: the Tahir that completes the fourth book is far more self-assured, far more willing to take risks, and far more in control of her own authorial voice than the opening chapters.