Tehanu

I've been reading through Earthsea half out of duty to finish everything by my favorite author; I hated A Wizard of Earthsea, loved Tombs of Atuan, and then found The Farthest Shore kinda tedious. But this book - written nearly 2 decades after the original trilogy - brought everything I love about Le Guin's work into the Earthsea series in a way that hadn't hooked me before. The prose, both deep and clear, and the rich depictions of life on Gont and musings on culture and gender finally brought what I'd wanted to see in Earthsea to the surface.

Wonderful unheroic postscript to the series, the view from age and infirmity and powerlessness of the breakdown of a society built on acquiring and wielding power. From LeGuin's afterword, "the anger of an underdog at social injustice. ... [transcending to] no longer identifying freedom with power, with separating being free from being in control."