Lord of Emperors
Sarantine Mosaic • Book 2
Narrated by Berny Clark
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
This is a book about making beautiful things in a world that destroys them, and Kay gives that wound no easy salve.
- Great if you want: literary fantasy steeped in Byzantine intrigue and elegiac beauty
- Listening experience: slow and meditative — accumulates emotional weight over 22 hours
- Narration: Clark's measured delivery matches Kay's unhurried, mournful prose
- Skip if: you need plot momentum — Kay prioritizes feeling over incident
About This Audiobook
Crispin the mosaicist has arrived in the fabled city of Sarantium to fulfill the artistic ambition of his life: covering the dome of the emperor's sanctuary with work that will outlast everything. But the city is a living conspiracy, and Crispin finds himself entangled in the fates of an exiled queen, a pair of feuding chariot-racing factions, and an emperor whose reach extends to places Crispin thought he had left behind. Guy Gavriel Kay closes the Sarantine Mosaic with the same lyrical density that opened it.
Berny Clark narrates the conclusion of a story whose emotional architecture has been built carefully across two novels, and the accumulated weight of the character relationships pays off in his handling of the finale. Kay's prose is more literary than the typical fantasy register, and Clark's voice honors that distinction. At nearly 22 hours and winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, Lord of Emperors is historical fantasy at its most accomplished.
