There's a particular satisfaction I associate with long serieses of literary novels--I'm thinking of A.S. Byatt's Frederica Potter books or the Jane Smiley trilogy that starts with Some Luck--where a conflict between two people appears intractable because it's fundamental to who those people are, but slowly, over the course of many years, the people change and the world transforms around them, until at last a realization crystallizes: the old irreconcilable problem can be, not overcome, but gently set aside.

Jade Legacy is like that, but with knife fights and martial artists downing helicopters.

At the beginning of the novel, the Kaul family, leaders of the No Peak Clan and therefore informal rulers of half the island nation of Kekon, are in serious trouble. Their old enemy, Ayt Mada of the Mountain clan, is ahead of them in terms of subordinates and resources. Worse, they don't trust each other. The cheerfully ruthless Pillar, Hilo, isn't talking to his sister Shae, the clan's Weather Man and business leader. ( His wife Wen... ) The family needs everyone's skills--Hilo's warrior leadership, Shae's business acumen, Wen's personal insight, and even contributions from their cousin Anden, who has chosen not to fight with jade at all--to stand against the Mountain.

I read the first chapters of Jade Legacy slowly, balancing the bleakness of the setup against the bleakness of the real world. No Peak members swear an oath: "The clan is my blood, and the Pillar is its master." At the quarter-mark, that oath heralds a transformation: an excruciating doom I had dreaded was turned aside, and the story becomes bigger and stranger. After all, Ayt Mada might not be the Kaul family's greatest threat. Kekon is only one island. Other nations, particularly the great powers locked in the Cold-War-like Slow War, would love to take Kekon's superpowered jade for themselves. The Kauls understand that wearing jade requires honor and responsibility--there are rules to follow and balances to maintain. The foreigners just want drugged-up supersoldiers. I sped through the remaining hundreds of pages in a matter of days.

If you began the series when Jade City came out, you have some idea what Jade Legacy might offer. If you're just picking up the series now, you'll find a fantasy story sideways from the twentieth century, rather than the more common medieval-ish technologies, that doesn't center fantasy-Europeans. These are books where bias and bigotry are real but are not destiny. They contain astonishing and bloodthirsty martial arts sequences, people who excel at mayhem, people who understand that finance is also mayhem, and small children who are their own people. Come for the jade; stay for the rich, layered, inexorable sense of transformation.

(Jade Legacy officially comes out on November 30. I read an ARC courtesy of Netgalley.)