So this is a trilogy of sorts from Kay, set in the not-Mediterranean of his Sarantium world, and I think it’s for the best that he returned to it. At its best, this series recaptures virtues that I don’t think have been on exhibit in Kay’s work since Sailing to Sarantium.

The first, Children of Earth and Sky, is the strongest. It’s set in not-Venice after the fall of Sarantium, and it does that Kay thing of dealing with normal people — an artist, a pirate, a merchant — in times of change and ferment, and seeing how their lives get tangled up in history.

It is surprising throughout, putting its characters together and then breaking them apart in ways that seem inevitable in the end, but which are never obvious in the moment. It is, I think, not a spoiler to anyone who’s read Kay’s work, to say that there’s an element of tragedy to the novel, and that it is suffused with loss throughout — being able to make the reader feel the loss of history in a poignant and personal way is maybe Kay’s greatest strength as a writer, and it’s on full display here.

A Brightness Long Ago and All the Seas of the World are prequels to that book, and direct sequels to each other. Prequels always end up being a bit worse than sequels, and so it is here — some of the surprise is gone as we know where some characters need to end up, and how some things will need to end.

But beyond those prequel problems, they just have more of Kay’s late-period weaknesses, the stuff I’ve been complaining about since Last Light of the Sun to one degree or another, where he gets up his own ass with little metatextual callouts about the nature of history and fate (and in this case, of authorship, for some reason) in ways that pull you out of the book.

Still, these aren’t major flaws. Mostly, this is Kay working in a successful mode as he tells these stories during the Italian Wars, as Sarantium falls into its last days. Compared to any of Kay’s other recent works, these are very strong; it’s just that Children didn’t have any of these problems, and it felt like maybe he had gotten past that tendency toward self-indulgence.

If you’ve liked Kay’s good stuff — and particularly if you liked Sailing to Sarantium, to which this series is almost a direct sequel at a thousand years remove — these three are recommended. (If you haven’t read Kay at all, this isn’t the place to start; you’ll want something like Tigana, which is also pseudo-Italian, but not actually set in this world.)