What I wanted was, first of all, to create a world where everybody looks like me.

I’ve always been a huge fan of epic fantasy, but I often enjoyed the concept more than the actual books in that genre. It started out really simply: I just wanted to write the book that I wanted to read. This time, readers follow the paths of four women - a soldier, poet, socialite and scholar - whose lives are undervalued in Olondria, and who must face the ravages of a war. Samatar returns to Olondria with “The Winged Histories,” out Tuesday from Small Beer Press. The book won a British Fantasy Award for best novel. In rich, poetic prose and employing lavish imagination, “A Stranger in Olondria” introduced this remarkable country where ghosts, religious fanatics and warring factions converged. It was 2013 when Samatar published her debut novel, “A Stranger in Olondria,” with Small Beer Press, the Massachusetts-based fantasy imprint run by Kelly Link and her husband, Gavin Grant. Now, with a doctorate in African languages and literature, she lives in Ventura and brings a dynamic set of cultural and linguistic influences to her fiction. Passionate about languages, Samatar moved to South Sudan and later to Egypt during her twenties to teach English and learn Arabic with her husband author Keith Miller. (Mar.Sofia Samatar was born to a Somali father and Swiss German Mennonite mother in a small town in northern Indiana. Samatar's writing strongly recalls Guy Gavriel Kay's fantasy, which reads like historical fiction, but there are strains here too of Jane Austen and something wilder.

Her prose is by turns sharp and sumptuous, and always perfectly controlled. Samatar refocuses these viewpoints to present something perpetually and pleasantly startling and unexpected. Each character weaves her experiences and observations into the land's folklore and mythology. Samatar gives each woman her own style of storytelling and view of events, so that the reader sees this episode in Olondria's history as though looking upon the scene through four different windows. Other viewpoint characters are Tialon, daughter of Ivrom, the Priest of the Stone, whose cult is overthrown in the revolution Seren, a young woman of the nomadic feredhai, who becomes the beloved of Tav and Siski, Tav's sister and one-time love of Andasya, who is the sole bearer of Andasya's terrible secret. Tavis is close kin to the current Telkan, the ruler of the fantasy realm of Olondria, but she leaves behind the expectations laid on noblewomen to become a soldier%E2%80%94and then, with her cousin Andasya, to lead a new rebellion. Samatar's lush sequel to A Stranger in Olondria is a story of revolution, religion, and electrifying love in four distinct voices.

A stranger in olondria summary