Malazan Book of the Fallen 03. Memories of Ice (Malazan Book of the Fallen (Paperback))

The third tale from the Mazalan Book of the Fallen, Memories of Ice is a convoluted military fantasy even more dense than its two predecessors. A deranged and not necessarily human prophet has set a cannibal rabble to conquer a continent, and various armies and wizards are out to stop him--but their reasons for doing this are many, various and often conflicting. The previous two books Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates were full of mysteries, some of them answered here--Erikson's is a world in which gods ascend from humanity to replace gods that fall or are overthrown and in which the world and the supernatural warrants that surround it are full of relics of past gods and past cultures. Young officer Paran tries to make sense of the return of his dead beloved as one of the four souls of a magical child; his commander Whiskeyjack tries to do the right thing as both soldier and human being; the scout Toc tries to survive hideous torture and pass on information he only partly knows. Erikson creates an impressive dark world of brutality and sudden beauty in which dizzying vistas of times past suddenly open; his work repays the concentration needed to follow his complex plotting and sentences. --Roz Kaveney