A review by morporum
Arslan by M.J. Engh

5.0

What can I say? It opens with the brutal rape of two children, and ends with the probable extinction of the human race, and somewhere along the way you forget to hate the man responsible for these and many other crimes. At once a skillful riff on Marlowe's Tamerlane and a meditation on human cruelty and grace, Mary Jane Engh reminds us that those two attributes can be contained in the same human. A dark, ugly, beautiful book.