The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade Book 1)

What a ride. It's really cloak'n'dagger'n'taxes: the novel. But far from a dry treatise on the geopolitics, economics and logistics of insurrection, it is a very intimate novel about what Empire does to a country, and to people. I've seldom been so hooked by so apparently slow a book. A definite must read for anyone who likes complex fantasy and company ledgers.

Exciting, feels realistic, war strategy, a lot of innuendo (and smugness? — everyone feels very clever). Passages of feeling powerful, passages of feeling completely powerless. I would recommend it with a content warning: "Cruel and depressing".