Brother Red by Adrian Selby

The Blurb:

When the trade caravan Driwna Marghoster was hired to protect is attacked, she discovers a dead body hidden inside a barrel. Born of the powerful but elusive Oskoro people, the body is a rare and priceless find, the centre of a tragic tale and the key to a larger mystery…

For when Driwna investigates who the body was meant for, she will find a trail of deceit and corruption which could bring down a kingdom, and an evil more powerful than she can imagine.

The Review:

It’s only February at this point, but I’m willing to bet that by the end of the year, Brother Red will be right up there with my favourite books of the year.

Now, I’ve only read one book by Adrian Selby before — The Winter Road. You can go back and check out my full feelings in my review, but the long and short of it was that I was fascinated by the world and blown away by the ending. Brother Red is set in the same setting many years later, with the lingering consequences shaping the way that the world has changed. This is also the same setting as Selby’s Snakewood, which I haven’t read, but I’m told there’s a few nods to that as well.

But do you need to have read those books to understand what’s going on here? I want to get this question out of the way quickly, and say no. Brother Red would in my opinion be absolutely fine to read as a stand-alone, or even as a jumping-off point into Selby’s other books. But what is it about?

Driwna Marghoster is a member of a powerful trading guild known as “the Post”. The Post is a very large organization spreading across the territory of several different peoples, and as is the case with many large organisations, it has fallen victim to corruption. A short way into the story, Driwna is tasked with rooting that corruption out.

Now, this is a very brutal world. There is a lot of death, a lot of violence, and the practice of slavery is featured quite prominently in this book. But something that I appreciated is that Driwna, despite having her own motives and personal demons, is a genuinely selfless and noble protagonist. As the cliché goes, the darker world allows her to shine brighter. But despite that, she has some steel to her. She’s more than willing to fight for something better. And more than that, she actively tries to lift up those around her.

The side-character cast in Brother Red is one of my favourites in recent memory. There’s Cal, who shares such a deep and endearing friendship with Driwna. There’s Bray, who is pulled away from the bottle for long enough to try and return to the man he once was. Then there’s Driwna’s parents, her love interest, and a couple of easily-hateable antagonists. Each have their own complexities, though these are glimpsed at in passing rather than shown in grand detail. Each adds a special something to the story.

The main villain is unknown to the protagonists for much of the book, although as readers we get to see a few chapters from their perspective. These are dotted throughout the novel wherever appropriate, including a couple of chapters at the very beginning. I don’t want to spoil too much, but there’s a bit of a body-hopping fantasy illuminati vibe going on here. To be honest, I found myself more invested in Driwna’s response to the villain rather than the villain themself, and the opening chapters from their perspective didn’t really kick the book off in a way that interested me. However, digging into a few more chapters soon changed that.

I don’t think that Brother Red will be for everyone, though. The prose and dialogue are very stylized, and I can imagine that this is the kind of book that you may want to check out a sample of before committing to. The world, too, could potentially be polarizing. Brother Red begins with a child death and this somewhat sets the tone for what follows. There are moments of optimism, sure, and the thrust of this story is very much about holding on to the light in the darkness, but the grim moments won’t be something that every reader is prepared to deal with. There isn’t any explicit sexual violence, I should say, though there is some harassment and mention thereof.

The aforementioned slavery too, while not taking place along racial lines, does take place along species lines, with experimentation on a tribe of people who are basically plant-based transhumanists. It’s portrayed as something abhorrent, especially from Driwna’s perspective, but some characters seem a little too pleased by the “progress” that slavery has bought them and I imagine some readers will want to avoid this.

For those well-versed in darker stories, though, Brother Red has a lot to offer. The nature of the book means that a lot of what we see of the setting is very travel-focused. A lot of fighting in wooded areas on a journey to some settlement, where harsh, emotional conversations await (some of which lead to fights of their own). When fighting, the characters will drug themselves with plant mixtures called “brews” that can make them faster and stronger, with the downside of being almost completely incapacitated when the “hangover” hits. This can tie into the strategy of the characters, as they may look to take advantage of an enemy when they are “paying the colour”, or they may risk taking brews of lesser strength in a fight to avoid the same happening to them later.

But fight scenes — as well written as they are — aren’t what make me remember a book. I’m the kind of reader who remembers the emotion of a scene, and the driving forces behind the characters. And if there’s one thing Brother Red has to share, it’s emotion. I don’t often shout out individual chapters in my reviews, but chapter 18 had one of the most powerful scenes with a parental relationship that I’ve ever read. And the ending… Adrian Selby can write a fucking ending. Somewhere along the line I got really attached to all of these characters, and by the time I put the book down I felt drained in the best possible way.

Again, look. This isn’t gonna be a book for everyone. There’s a lot here that one reader might love and another might loathe. The stylized prose and lengthy chapters mean that it doesn’t have that pick-up-ability factor. There are time-skips that some might find irritating. Some side characters are sacrificed to the grimdark manifesto (and I do feel like a couple of them deserved better). The darker scenes might turn some readers away, and the sheer amount of names means that the politics can feel like too much too quickly. But I was so immersed in the struggles and lives of these people that I just… I cared. I wanted them to leave the world better than how they found it.

There’s a rare feeling of satisfaction than comes when you finish a book you’ve really enjoyed. Brother Red gave me that, through the strength of its emotions and the strength of its ending. Driwna’s story will stay with me for a long time.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review. Thank you to Orbit UK for the review copy!