Kay has written some amazing books, but unfortunately this isn’t one of them. In Under Heaven he has moved away from his usual fantasy European setting and gone for a barely fictionalised account of a real incident from Chinese history, and for once I felt that his fidelity to the original facts got in the way of telling a good story. The plot is one of political, military and sexual tension; there are a couple of small fantasy elements which are so marginal that it hardly seems worth including them; and there is a poet who, thank god, does not inflict too much poetry on us. It’s not a bad book, but disappointing in the context of Kay’s earlier heights of achievement.