I enjoyed this a great deal. It was an experience, not just a story and a telling, but all of that and more - a world, a mindset, an exploration - and deeply satisfying all up.

The first thing that grabbed me was the strength of the first-person narrator. There's a deep and stark and involved style to his voice that helps seat the book in its time and place (more about this later) but also establishes the novel firmly as Thurstan-telling-his-story. I have endless impatience with books that a first-person without a reason - i.e. why and how is this person telling me their story? - but this one does it flat out with what appears to be bald-faced honesty, that later gains a layer of knowing extra meaning (which I love).

And through the telling, the reader comes to understand intrinsically - so much more deeply than merely being told - some aspects of the 12th-century Mediterranean that underpin the book: that abstract thought is underdeveloped, and the concept of visualising and imagining one close to magic; that this is a world in which simplicity and complexity war, or at least overlap; and that while it could be said that the Dark Ages are ending, there has never been such hate as is now welling up.

Amidst all of this, I found the entwined stories of political intrigue and Thurstan's emotional getting-of-wisdom to be deeply satisfying, in that way I like best where things reveal to have been just what I thought, but even more so and with added twists I had not seen coming. And while I had some slight distresses about the way Alicia was depicted at the end of the day, Nesrin was pretty magnificent.