In book two of Lian Hearn's Tale of Shikanoko series, a self-assured warrior stumbles into a game of Go that…
turns fatal. An ambitious lord leaves his nephew for dead and seizes his lands. A stubborn father forces his son to give up his wife to his older brother. A powerful priest meddles in the succession to the Lotus Throne. A woman of the Old People seeks five fathers for her five children, who will go on to found the Spider Tribe and direct the fate of the country
The residents of an isolated village in a dreamlike world scavenge for supplies in the surrounding forest, collecting scattered items…
left over from a long time past. No one strays far from this community, fearing what may lie beyond it. When they find a stack of notebooks by an unknown author, a young villager becomes obsessed with their contents. She sets out on a quest to find the writer. As she ventures into the unknown, she discovers a world both barren and increasingly complex. The closer she gets to her goal, the more she realizes that the encounter she's been seeking probably won't be what she wanted. --back cover