Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manors by Ellen Kushner (<lj site="livejournal.com" user="ellen_kushner"

[lightreads]

Fiction, historical/fantasy, depending on how you look at it. Politics, class, sword fighting, and an intense, subtle M/M romance. This book just made me happy. It's clever but not baroque, emotionally resonant, sweet and bitter and tense. I get the impression this was Kushner's first published novel, and there are a few missteps -- most notably a belief that the reader will be as interested in secondary characters as in the protagonists. But what protagonists they are -- subversive, unfitting, sympathetic. It's also complex and nuanced, and I suspect when I read it again (which I will) it will be a new experience
and angle all over again. By leaps and bounds my favorite out of the month.