Ilmar is a city at the edge of the Palleseen empire, and one conquered in name but perhaps not in spirit; it is full of restless natives, bitter refugees, starry-eyed students, and ruthless criminals, and also sits on the edge of a haunted magical forest, last resort for the desperate. Tchaikovsky assembles a cast of archetypes and then proceeds to make them into whole characters that grate on one another’s edges and force one another into growth, and sets it against a background of cultural repression and inevitable rebellion. Fascinating read.