It is quite difficult to coherently explain why I like Megan Whalen Turner’s Attolia series (The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia, A Conspiracy of Kings) so much, because most of those reasons involve enormous spoilers for the first two books. On the other hand, this problem would have been more vexing before the fourth book, because I didn’t like that nearly as well and as a result am less enthusiastic about recommending the entire series to people.
These are published as YA, though the first is the one that fits most comfortably in that genre. They are fantasies mostly in the same way that Swordspoint is, that is, they are deliberately set not in our world in an ahistorical and nonmagical time and place. They do weave in many recognizable historical elements, mostly Greek history and mythology (regrettably, it appears the principal bad guys are Persian-analogues). However, a small but significant strand in the series involves deities in a way that I found really cool and unusual.
Structurally, it may be useful to think of The Thief as a prologue. I enjoyed it, because it’s the kind of first-person narration that is right up my alley, but it is very different from the rest of the books and is probably not necessary to read first. Of the rest, Queen and King are reasonably described as younger cousins of Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles: not nearly as formidably complex, but with something of the same slightly distant, yet highly Id Vortex-y, approach to complex characters and their relationships, politics, and revelation of plot. I didn’t like King as much at first, because I found it disorienting to have a new character as a narrator, but it definitely grew on me, so if you like Queen, it’s definitely worth reading all of King as well.
Unfortunately, then there’s Conspiracy, about which I have two criticisms. One is that the first-person sections don’t work as what they are purported to be; this only shows up in small ways but it’s the kind of thing that bothers me. The other is an enormous spoiler for the book’s end, which I discussed back in the day over at LiveJournal (which link shows just how backlogged I am here). Upon re-reading, yes, I still don’t like it; worse, it makes me very dubious about the direction of the series.
So if these sound appealing, to the limited extent I can convey their appeal without spoiling them (and they really are best read without spoilers), you might consider reading through King and then stopping for the moment: it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, and that way if the rest of the series doesn’t redeem itself, then you won’t have spent the time. But the first three are definitely worth reading.
(Series name note: the fan-created consensus appears to be “Queen’s Thief,” which I don’t like. “Attolia” isn’t really accurate either, but at least has the virtue of being in two of the book titles.)
Conspiracy is my favorite, I think. I like Sophos as a narrator, and I like the way Turner develops the theme of choices made in subtle and not-so-suibtle ways throughout the book. When Sophos describes building a retaining wall, for example, he describes the completed wall as the result of a series of choices.
I do think the notion that leaders of sovereign nations might be (or ought to be) bound by their oaths is naive. Somebody — Eddis, I think — says you can’t judge what she and Sophos and Gen and Attolia do by the standards that apply to ordinary people, and if that’s so, it seems to me you also can’t assume that Sophos will, or should, be bound by simply having given an oath of loyalty to Gen, if at some point he thinks it will be better for Sounis for the King of Sounis to break that oath. If the ultimate morality for a king is to act in the best intersts of his nation, then Sophos can and should break his oath when he thinks that’s in Sounis’s best interest.
I like Sophos a lot and wanted to like his narration, I’m just really sensitive to the forms of first-person narration.