Books book reviews Sovereign of a Lost Land: Katherine Arden’s The Unicorn Hunters The Unicorn Hunters is a driving, atmospheric fantasy that will entice you and then not let go. By Sasha Bonkowsky | Published on July 27, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share The year is 1490. The peninsula of Brittany is fiercely independent, and would very much like to remain that way. However, having lost the Mad War two years prior, their duchess Anne is contracted to marry the French King, Charles VIII. When she does there will be no more Brittany, only France: a great engorged kingdom stretching from the Rhine in the east to the stormy seas in the west. Anne, disarmingly pretty and politically calculating, does not want this. She promised her father on his deathbed she would never wed France; together with her bastard brother Henri, her stubborn younger sister Isabeau, and Nantes’ population of loyal Bretons, she has a plan: She will marry in secret Maximilien, King of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor, pay off the Pope to uphold it, and use his armies to keep Charles away. On a personal level, Anne benefits little; she will still have to live at her husband’s court, leaving her family and her verdant Brittany behind, her duties reduced to producing male heirs. But Brittany will survive; it is the role of a sovereign to give all they are for their people. (Isn’t it?) It might work. There is no love lost between Austria and France; with time to move his armies and prepare, Maximilien will defend her. But the French envoy is pressing for marriage now. Anne needs to buy herself that time, which she does with a story of a unicorn spotted in the mysterious forests of Brocéliande: the noblest and rarest prey in all Europe, whose horn and hide would dazzle the throne room of any king, and whose hunt requires a virgin of unimpeachable birth and high virtue. Anne can’t even entertain talk of marriage if they are to hunt it. Of course she’s lying through her teeth—there hasn’t been a unicorn seen in over twenty years—but France’s envoy, the light of greed in his eyes, buys it. Off they trot, Anne doing everything she can to slow the proceedings. Anne means to use the magical nature of Brocéliande as no more than a shield, sending France on a wild goose (well, unicorn) chase and performing her proxy-marriage ceremony with Maximilien there, where diviners cannot see. But the magic of the Lost Lands is unpredictable and capricious: The convent where Anne stays is beset by ghosts (“anaon”, the unquiet dead), the moon will not shine correctly, and, deep in the glades of Brocéliande, what stumbles into Anne’s path but a real unicorn, pursued by a fey hunt. Anne rides with it and sets it free, but its passage leaves something else behind: a diviner named Julian Moreau, pale and thin and horrified, who tells them all he’s been trapped in the Lost Lands for two hundred years. Worse, the Lost Lands’ magic trails them back to Nantes, threatening to unravel all of Anne’s careful planning. Emperor Maximilien is haunted in Flanders by his dead wife Mary; he refuses to leave her behind to sail to Anne’s aid. Omens of pouring saltwater and rushing flames herald—according to Moreau—that the fey king also has marriage designs on the duchess of Brittany. And Moreau himself, a man steeped in that magic more than anyone else living, has his own loyalties; it seems he may not have stumbled back to the human realm fully by accident. Buy the Book The Unicorn Hunters Katherine Arden Buy Book The Unicorn Hunters Katherine Arden Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Anne of Brittany was a real person, but her story is a tragic one. Born under the cloud of encroaching French rule, her sister Isabeau killed by pneumonia at eleven, she nevertheless attempted at thirteen to break free by means of proxy marriage to Maximilian I of Austria. However, Maximilian was too busy in Hungary to come to her aid; France invaded Brittany again, laying siege to Rennes for two months, and at fifteen Anne was forced to marry Charles VIII of France. She did everything she could through the marriage contracts to maintain Brittany’s independence, but she would spend the rest of her life almost continuously pregnant, and died at thirty-six. Nevertheless, Katherine Arden writes in her afterword: “It is impossible to read about this young woman and not admire her… what if everything were different? What would have happened had this young and brave and passionate girl had the power to chart her own destiny?” Of course this reminded me of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Written on the Dark, another alt-history story of medieval France that seeks to rewrite some of its ignobler moments, in this case the assassination of Louis I, Duke of Orleáns, and the burning at the stake of Joan of Arc. It’s an enticing idea to take the injustices of history, correct them, and allow the clever, cornered, outmatched poets and duchesses to win out over the forces of money and power and steel. Not quite our own world, not quite fantasy; a world that only might have been. But where Written on the Dark spans decades, interested in how events cascade and ripple through years, The Unicorn Hunters takes place over no more than two months, focused on a single moment in time that could have—should have—been better. Arden’s admiration for Anne of Brittany also shines through in the character work: Anne is a deeply charming, entertaining protagonist, taking advantage of those who underestimate her to navigate 15th-century court politics. Even without knowing her history when first reading The Unicorn Hunters, it’s not hard to want her to find a way out of the quagmire she’s been stuck in. Take her first interaction with the French envoy, La Trémoille, told from his perspective. Just pages ago we were introduced to Anne, cheerful but sober and with a sharp mind for statecraft, waiting impatiently for Austria’s messenger. But La Trémoille is given a childish banquet of sweet foods and marchpane, and when Anne receives him she is breathless, blushing, and utterly guileless, earnestly confiding in him the secret of the unicorn. The reader is in on the joke—we snicker along at La Trémoille’s blithe ignorance that this empty-headed girl could have ulterior motives—and when the scene’s concluded, Anne’s brother Henri sums it up best: “Lord, how do you do it? One moment my sister is there, and the next there is a ninny blushing on cue… [La Trémoille] had no idea what struck him.” Levity, adventure, and magic balances out the precarity of the book; Anne is forever outrunning a dozen different dooms (including that of her real-life history), carrying all of Brittany on her shoulders. The Unicorn Hunters is a driving, atmospheric fantasy that, like its Lost Lands, will entice you and then not let go.[end-mark] The Unicorn Hunters is published by Del Rey.Read an excerpt. The post Sovereign of a Lost Land: Katherine Arden’s <i>The Unicorn Hunters</i> appeared first on Reactor.