I finished Canticle at the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, sitting in my twelfth-story room while morning light washed the night out of the sky.  This is book two of The Psalms of Isaak, which is planned to be five books (the first book is Lamentation).
This series is an engaging for me as the George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire.”  The books are a little shorter and are coming out more regularly, and so I feel like there’s a chance of an epic fantasy series that will begin well and end both well and on schedule. That’s my hope for this after being disappointed waiting for the next Song of Ice and Fire book and after the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series was interrupted (I am grateful the talented Brandon Sanderson is finishing them, but I haven’t read his book yet). Yes, I am a fan of big fat fantasy, especially the broad and deep epic variety that has a theme and a story and interesting people on all sides of its conflicts.
I want to be careful of spoilers for either book, but the Named Lands are rich with both history and promise, and the novel is told through the eyes of many and varied protagonists, and the plot left the paths I thought it was walking often enough to please me immensely.
If you haven’t started the series, a taste is available in the story “A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon” up on Tor.com. To read more about Ken and his work, go by www.kenscholes.com.
I just finished the first volume and found it to be a delightfully baroque piece, reminiscent of Vance and of Moorcock – but wholly its own thing.
Excellent stuff.
Well, and I actually found Canticle to be even better than Lamentation. It is amazing to me that these are Ken’s first two novels.
If you’re looking for new books along the lines of Brandon Sanderson’s, “Servant of a Dark God” is great. It’s the first book in a trilogy by John Brown and is crazy good. This is actually his first book, which is really surprising because it is so well done. I seriously couldn’t put it down. It’s very well written and is a fresh take on the fantasy genre. You should check it out at http://johndbrown.com/novels/