6.13.2010
The Company
by K.J. Parker, 419pgs, paperback
Overall Grade: A
Another stunning work by K.J. Parker (who wrote the Engineer trilogy). This is a stand-alone novel. During the war, A Company was a small group of men who were linebreakers, attacking the enemy head-on in front of the main army in order to break the line and cause disarray. As you can imagine, these guys are made out of more than a little brass to be able to do this for years and come out alive and with all their limbs, no less. This story picks up many years after the war, when the fifth member of their company, Teuche Kunessin, finally retires from the military and returns home to Faralia. He knows exactly what buttons to press to get the other four to drop everything in their pitiful lives and travel with him to an island he has appropriated from the government to start the farm he's always wanted. Unfortunately, if you've read the Engineer trilogy, nothing is ever so simply with Parker's stories. It turns out that Teuche has a secret he's been keeping from the others and he's not the only one with secrets either.
Labels: genre: fiction, media: book
