Written on the Dark

Instant National Bestseller!

From the internationally bestselling author of Tigana, All the Seas of the World, and A Brightness Long Ago comes a majestic new novel of love and war that brilliantly evokes the drama and turbulence of medieval France.

Thierry Villar is a well-known—even notorious—tavern poet, intimately familiar with the rogues and shadows of that world, but not at all with courts and power. He is an unlikely person, despite his quickness, to be swept into the deadly contests of ambitious royals, assassins, and invading armies.

But he is indeed drawn into all these things on a savagely cold night in his beloved city of Orane. And so Thierry must use all the intelligence and charm he can muster as power struggles merge with a decades-long war to bring his country to the brink of destruction.

As he does, he meets his poetic equal in an aristocratic woman and is drawn to more than one unsettling person with a connection to the world beyond this one. He also crosses paths with an extraordinary young woman driven by voices within to try to heal the ailing king — and help his forces in war. A wide and varied set of people from all walks of life take their places in the rich tapestry of this story.

Both sweeping and intimate, Written on the Dark is an elegant tour de force about power and ambition playing out amid the equally intense human need for art and beauty, and memories to be left behind.

GUY GAVRIEL KAY is the internationally bestselling author of fifteen previous novels, including the Fionavar Tapestry series, Tigana, and most recently, All the Seas of the World, A Brightness Long Ago, and Children of Earth and Sky. He has been awarded the International Goliardos Prize for his work in the literature of the fantastic and won the World Fantasy Award for Ysabel in 2008. In 2014, he was named to the Order of Canada, the country's highest civilian honour. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages.

ISBN: 9781037800504
Format: Hardback
Pages: 320
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: May 27, 2025

“The brilliance of Written on the Dark is its capacity to be many things at once. It’s a great story, or series of stories, moving from murder mystery to court drama to war epic to tale of love and loss and beyond, like a song changing keys. And it works. . . . Written on the Dark is equally as impressive for its accessibility and its density. . . But its accessibility doesn’t undermine its insightfulness, which is to say that a lot happens in the novel that reveals both something about the world in which the story unfolds, and our own. It’s quite an achievement.”

—The Globe and Mail

“An absolutely astonishing novel about poetry, and war, and what it means to be human, by our greatest living writer of the fantastic. Written on the Dark shines with its own unearthly light: Guy Gavriel Kay has given us, quite simply, a masterpiece."

—J.M. Miro, international bestselling author of Ordinary Monsters and Bringer of Dust

"The pen proves mightier than the sword in this masterful historical fantasy. . . . Kay burnishes his reputation for worldbuilding with this believable, magic-tinged analogue for medieval France."