Paladin of Souls

Paladin of Souls is the Lois McMaster Bujold novel that won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus Fantasy award in a single year, and reading it again I think it earned all three. The protagonist is Ista, a middle-aged widow who has been quietly trying to recover from a long depression and a difficult marriage in the kingdom of Chalion. Ista decides she needs to leave the castle and go on pilgrimage. The pilgrimage is not what she expected.

What Bujold does in this book is unusual and genuinely difficult. She writes a fantasy protagonist who is a middle-aged woman, who has known small power and now does not, who is suspicious of religious experience because of what religion did to her younger self, and who is about to become the unexpected vessel of a god she does not particularly want to serve. The theology of the book is more carefully worked out than fantasy theology usually is. The character is one of the great achievements of contemporary fantasy writing.

You can read this without having read The Curse of Chalion first, but the first book sets up the religious system in ways that pay off here. Five stars. A genuine masterpiece of the form. Recommended without reservation.