Rejoice, fans of intelligent, passionate, character-driven historical fantasy. Today Penguin Random House announced Children of Earth and Sky, a new novel by the great Guy Gavriel Kay.

I’ve been a huge fan of Kay for, well, decades now — ever since I found myself in tears on a New Jersey Transit train, reading The Lions of Al-Rassan. He’s one of very few authors whose books I buy on sight, in hardcover, on release day.

Below the cut, you’ll find a larger image of the cover and the novel’s synopsis. Elsewhere on this site you can find my review of the author’s most recent novel, River of Stars, an excerpt of that novel, and an interview I conducted in 2013 with Guy Gavriel Kay.

The bestselling author of the groundbreaking novels Under Heaven and River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay is back with a new novel, Children of Earth and Sky, set in a world inspired by the conflicts and dramas of Renaissance Europe. Against this tumultuous backdrop the lives of men and women unfold on the borderlands—where empires and faiths collide.

From the small coastal town of Senjan, notorious for its pirates, a young woman sets out to find vengeance for her lost family. That same spring, from the wealthy city-state of Seressa, famous for its canals and lagoon, come two very different people: a young artist traveling to the dangerous east to paint the grand khalif at his request—and possibly to do more—and a fiercely intelligent, angry woman, posing as a doctor’s wife, but sent by Seressa as a spy.

The trading ship that carries them is commanded by the accomplished younger son of a merchant family, ambivalent about the life he’s been born to live. And farther east a boy trains to become a soldier in the elite infantry of the khalif—to win glory in the war everyone knows is coming.

As these lives entwine, their fates—and those of many others—will hang in the balance, when the khalif sends out his massive army to take the great fortress that is the gateway to the western world…

Children of Earth and Sky will be released on May 16, 2016.