Powers

Gavir is a slave in the city-state of Etra, raised in the household of Arcamand with his sister Sallo, and he has two gifts that set him apart. He can remember everything he reads or hears, exactly, which makes him valuable and marks him out to be trained as the family's teacher. He also sees things that have not yet happened, which he has learned to keep to himself. Gavir's account of his childhood is affectionate and entirely unsentimental about the arrangement that produces it: kindness and cruelty issue from the same hands, and the household's affection for its property is real and worth nothing. When violence takes Sallo and the family closes ranks to protect the man responsible, Gavir walks out into a world he has no preparation for. What follows is a long road through the Marshes where he was born, a forest community of runaway slaves governed by a charismatic man with no interest in being questioned, and a succession of places that each promise freedom and deliver something short of it. Le Guin's final Annals of the Western Shore novel is patient, sorrowful and clear, and its subject is the slow work of learning that you are entitled to a self at all.