Booklog 2/2022: Lois McMaster Bujold: Paladin of Souls – Five Gods #2

I read this many years ago, but revisited it this time in audiobook form, read (extremely well) by Kate Reading. This follows a few years after the events in Curse of Chalion, which is my all-time favourite book. This time the story revolves around forty year old Ista, Dowager Royina of Chalion, whose sanity hung by a thread in the earlier book, but the curse of Chalion has now been lifted and Ista is once more in her right mind, though her court ladies and the castellan don't believe it. Restless she decides to get away from their cloying concern by going on a pilgrimage.

But the gods have not finished with Ista. She has dreams of a man lying in a bed as still as death but not dead, and then she gets a visit from the Bastard, the fifth Chalionese god. As once before, she is granted god-sight and that leads her to intervene in a complex puzzle of demon possession complicated by invaders. Expect peril, romance, excellent worldbuilding and a complex magic/theology system. This book won the Hugo and nebula for the best novel, and it was well deserved.