Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden
The trilogy's later volumes took the World Fantasy Award (Madouc, 1990); its blend of folklore and statecraft visibly influenced Gaiman's Stardust and modern fairy-tale epic alike.
Book Entry · Fantasy
What is Soldier of the Mist about?
Latro, a mercenary wounded at the head in 479 BC, forgets each day by the next morning — and, in compensation, sees and converses with the gods, ghosts and nymphs of Greece, who are everywhere and rather pleased to be noticed. His scroll, written each evening to instruct his next self, is the novel: a first-person narrative by a man meeting his friends for the first time daily, blessed and cursed in a single stroke, walking through the Persian Wars unable to retain that he may have offended the Earth Mother herself. The inverse of Severian's perfect memory, and every bit as treacherous a document.
Why it matters
Locus Fantasy Award winner; with its sequels, the most rigorous use of amnesia as narrative engine in fantasy — Memento with hoplites, decades early.
Read next
The Once and Future King
The definitive modern Arthuriad: source of Camelot the musical, an acknowledged wellspring for writers from Gaiman to Rowling, and one of fantasy's few genuine tragedies.
Till We Have Faces
Widely held (by Lewis himself, among others) to be his best book: the proof that the Narnian apologist could write tragic, ambiguous myth for adults — a touchstone for literary fantasy's mythic-retelling tradition.