Lavinia
Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel 2009. Mythopoeic Fantasy Award nominee 2009, BSFA Award nominee 2010, Tähtifantasia Award nominee 2010.
In a richly imagined, beautiful new novel, an acclaimed writer gives an epic heroine her voice
In The Aeneid, Vergil’s hero fights to claim the king’s daughter, Lavinia, with whom he is destined to found an empire. Lavinia herself never speaks a word in the poem. Now, Ursula K. Le Guin gives Lavinia a voice in a novel that takes us to the half-wild world of ancient Italy, when Rome was a muddy village near seven hills.
Lavinia grows up knowing nothing but peace and freedom, until suitors come. Her mother wants her to marry handsome, ambitious Turnus. But omens and prophecies spoken by the sacred springs say she must marry a foreigner – that she will be the cause of a bitter war – and that her husband will not live long. When a fleet of Trojan ships sails up the Tiber, Lavinia decides to make her own destiny, and she tells us what Vergil did not: the story of her life, and of the love of her life.
Lavinia is a book of passion and war, generous and austerely beautiful, from a writer working at the height of her powers.
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Ursula K. Le Guin
In a literary landscape often dominated by action and conquest, Ursula K. Le Guin carved quiet, radical paths—through forests of magic, across alien planets, and into the deep folds of human nature. Her stories didn’t shout; they asked, wondered, and listened. Through them, she reimagined what science fiction and fantasy could be—not just a reflection of our world, but a transformation of how we see it.
Born in 1929 to a family steeped in stories and scholarship—her father was an anthropologist, her mother a writer and the biographer of Ishi—Le Guin was raised among mythologies, cultural curiosity, and a profound respect for the power of narrative. These early influences are stitched into every book she wrote, from A Wizard of Earthsea to The Left Hand of Darkness.
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