Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr by John Crowley

There seems to have been a good deal of publicity around this novel when it came out last October, but I missed all of it and didn’t take notice of Ka until I heard Jonathan Strahan praising it. The novel is published by Saga Press, which charges a very reasonable $7.99 for the ebook, so I picked it up, read it immediately, and I’m now perplexed that Ka did not appear on either the Hugo or Nebula ballots. This is a wonderful novel.

Ka is a story told from the point of view of a crow, whose name is “Dar Oakley” and who, by strange circumstance, comes to live over a span of time encompassing two to three thousand years. The stories he takes part in and the people he comes to know are endlessly fascinating.

Not since childhood have I been interested in stories told from an animal’s point of view, but this one was so highly praised I had to look into it, and I was hooked from the first page.

From a personal perspective — that of a writer forever struggling to comprehend the marketplace — Ka astonishes me for the sheer bravery required of its author to even conceptualize a novel like this — a novel about a crow! — and the confidence to believe, during the long hard writing process, that there would be a market for it. I hope there’s a market for it! I hope it’s doing well. And I’m very glad there are still great writers willing to take chances of this kind.

For more about the novel, see Gary K. Wolfe’s review at Locus.

Find it at Amazon here.

I usually provide a universal link to other vendors, but the link site wasn’t working. Sorry!