Sorcery Rising

Sorcery Rising is the first novel in the Fool's Gold trilogy from Jude Fisher (Jane Johnson writing under pseudonym), set in a fantasy world organized around an annual trading festival called the Allfair where two cultures (the Eyran north and the Istrian south) meet under truce to do business. The book follows several point-of-view characters whose stories converge at the Allfair, with the festival turning into the trigger for a long-prepared cultural and military rupture.

Fisher's strength in Sorcery Rising is the worldbuilding patience. The two cultures are rendered with the kind of careful distinction that the form rewards, with the Eyran north drawing on Viking-and-Norse material and the Istrian south drawing on medieval-Iberian and North African sources. The festival texture (the trading tents, the religious differences, the small daily protocols of two cultures cooperating uneasily) is rendered with care. Fans of Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders or Mary Gentle's Ash sequence will recognize the careful late-90s and early-2000s fantasy register.

The closing chapters set up the trilogy's second volume with appropriate momentum.

Four stars. A serious fantasy trilogy opener. The Sorcery Rising Jude Fisher novel is worth tracking down for fantasy readers who like their secondary-world fiction with serious cultural distinction. Read the rest of Fool's Gold in order.