The Goblin Emperor
I just finished truepenny's novel The Goblin Emperor, and loved it. There are not enough novels about good people, I think. Not that everyone in the book is good--saccharine doesn't appeal to me any more than anyone else--but it allows for the possibility of goodness, where too many other books suffer from an excess of cynicism under the guise of realism (see Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!). It's not a fast-paced or "active" novel (in contrast to, say, Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards series): conversations and thoughts consume the pages, and their material consequences generally occur off-screen. The general flow was good, although I will admit to needing to stop now and then to get my bearings amid a fairly vast array of names, some of them very similar to each other and/or long. For all that, I found it quite absorbing from start to end, and recommend it highly. I hope that it finds some awards worth winning, too!