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Robin Hobb's powerful novels transcend the fantasy genre
In a pleasant rural manor house, at an unspecified moment in the distant past of a different world, a middle-aged man and his wife are enjoying a hard-earned retirement. The anguished turbulence of their youth is over, resolved into quiet contentment. Yet the past has a trick of leaching into the present. So it is that FitzChivalry Farseer, hero of Robin Hobb's Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies, makes his return after an absence of almost a decade.
Hobb's imaginary realm of the Six Duchies, constructed over the past 19 years, has made her a star of fantasy fiction. Within her meticulously realised world, states skirmish, aristocratic intrigues fester, and farmers are threatened by raiders from across the seas. The most sophisticated technology is magic, of which there is a potent range.
Since the Tawny...