Tehanu

Tenar, who was once the Eaten One in the Tombs of Atuan and who could have been a mage, chose instead a farm on Gont, a husband, and children who have grown up and gone. Widowed and known to her neighbours as Goha, she takes in a child who has been beaten, burned and left for dead by the people who should have kept her, and calls her Therru. Then Ged is carried back to Gont, having spent everything he had in the land of the dead, no longer Archmage, no longer a mage at all, and Tenar finds herself caring for two people who must learn to live without the thing that defined them. Le Guin returns to Earthsea after nearly twenty years and looks at it from the ground: from the kitchens and the goat pastures and the position of women in a world whose power has always been described in men's terms. It is a quiet book with real menace running under it, and it argues, patiently and with some anger, that the questions the earlier novels answered were not the only ones worth asking.