This is an old review of mine of A Shadow in Summer, a book that kicked off a fantasy series I really enjoyed by Daniel Abraham and view as underrated and a prime target for fans of his The Expanse (which he co-created under the name James S.A. Corey) should go check out. Hope you enjoy.
As luck would have it, I had my eye on this book since mid-2005 and was fortunate enough to get my hands on it a couple of months before release. It’s now topical again — just released this week — and sporting an endorsement from the ever-popular George R.R. Martin.
“…an elegant style that reminded me by turns of Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, and M. John Harrison, while still remaining very much his own….”
You can also check out my lengthy interview with Daniel Abraham
“…an elegant style that reminded me by turns of Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, and M. John Harrison, while still remaining very much his own…”
You can also check out my lengthy interview with Daniel Abraham, but as far as blurbs go — however well-meaning or glittering — I usually find them largely inconsequential. Still, if a writer truly evoked Wolfe, Harrison, and Vance in a single book, I’d go to church this Sunday and repent my numerous sins — as God himself has apparently returned and now works for Tor.
All that said, A Shadow in Summer turns out to be a fine choice for anyone looking for a new fantasy series to explore in early 2006.
Although our journey begins in a monastic school for aspiring poets, the bulk of the novel unfolds in the port city of Saraykeht — a jewel of the Khaiem, one of the surviving city-states of a long-fallen empire. Saraykeht is not a military powerhouse, but it is an economic marvel, and it lives free of fear from the jingoistic, expansionist Galts — a luxury afforded by the presence of the poet Heshai-kvo.
Abraham’s poets are not just artists or scholars — they wield the story’s central fantastic element. Through rigorous training in discipline and language, they alone can bind to them an Andat — an avatar of an abstract idea, given shape and form through precise articulation. Heshai’s Andat is a powerful one, both his opposite and, perhaps, a dark mirror of his own self.
His name is Removing-The-Part-That-Continues. In the North, he is called Sterile. In the Summer Cities, he is Seedless. While Seedless helps Saraykeht by cutting harvest costs and enhancing productivity, his real power lies in destruction. He can unmake fertility — of crops, livestock, even people. Entire generations could be wiped out by a mere shift in his will.
Andats don’t want to be bound. They remember their previous forms, and they work constantly, subtly, and often maliciously to undermine their poets. Seedless, in particular, demonstrates how a living idea — born from words — can shape, subvert, and ultimately unravel the lives of those around him.
Rather than giving us broad overviews of his world, Abraham plunges us into the lives of characters already caught in the long shadows of past choices and present manipulations. We follow:
- Itani, a seemingly simple man, struggling to remain so in complicated times;
- Maati, a student sent to apprentice under Heshai;
- Heshai himself, a poet haunted by guilt and locked in a toxic symbiosis with his Andat;
- Amat Kyaan, a shrewd and seasoned overseer of the Galt trading house in Saraykeht;
- Marchat Wilsin, her friend and Galt’s lead negotiator, playing a dangerous, covert game;
- Liat Chokavi, Itani’s lover and Amat’s aide, whose ambitions blind her to the stakes;
- And finally, a pregnant Nippu girl caught in the center of a web — spun by Seedless — in which all but one of them are expendable.
The genius of the book lies in how Abraham blends the fantastic with the deeply human. The Andat-poet relationship feels unlike anything else in fantasy — a burden, a creation, a metaphor for control and failure, for hubris and sorrow. He also introduces a beautiful system of social communication, where body language, poses, and gestures are as essential as words themselves. What could easily have been a gimmick instead becomes a quiet triumph — a layer of richness that rewards attentive reading.
Crucially, the power in this world isn’t treated as something outside the human sphere. The Andat are not divine beings or cosmic forces. They are linguistic constructs, summoned and bound through mastery of meaning. In that way, this is a fantasy novel about language itself — its responsibilities, its consequences, and its inescapable flaws.
As I noted in another recent review, fans of epic fantasy love debuts. And so, A Shadow in Summer doesn’t need to find an audience — it just needs to prove itself worthy of one. It succeeds. This novel is a rare opening volume: confident, subtle, and unconcerned with copying what has come before. The remaining books in The Long Price Quartet — Winter Cities, An Autumn War, and The Price of Spring — promise a journey not of escalating spectacle, but deepening resonance.
Abraham avoids the common traps of fantasy set in Eastern-inspired locales. There’s no exoticism, no shallow borrowing — only integration and invention. His world is not just different; it feels different. The tension is real, the stakes are personal. Seedless, as an antagonist, is a masterpiece: alien and eloquent, a being of poetry, shaped by (and spiteful of) the human condition.
In fact, the unifying theme that binds the entire cast into a coherent ensemble is their search for freedom. Though their paths are vastly different, all strive toward the same elusive goal. That desire is captured beautifully in a quiet moment between travelers:
“I think it’s why I keep traveling even though I’m not really suited to it. Whenever I’m in one place, I remember another. So I’ll be in Udun and thinking about a black crab stew they serve in Chaburi-tan, or in Saraykeht, thinking of the way the rain falls in Utani. If I could take them all — all the best parts of all the cities — and bring them to a single place, I think that would be paradise.”
And echoed, with tragic simplicity, by Seedless himself:
“We want to return to our natural, like the rain falls.”
Abraham hints at greater histories — past empires where poets commanded multiple Andats, a system of succession built on blood, forbidden powers that still echo in memory. He sets up a love triangle that refuses easy sides, and he tells a story about people making decisions — moral, economic, personal — not to save empires, but because that’s what people do. Empires change because of them, not for them.
It’s a delicate balance — zooming in and out at just the right moments, so that the novel feels both intimate and sweeping. A quiet triumph, and a true discovery.