Ursula Le Guin's Malafrena is set in an era familiar from novels such as Le Rouge et le Noir. The background is nineteenth-century Europe under the yoke of the Austrian Empire; the ideas are those of liberty and nationalism; and the hero, Itale Sorde, is the son of a provincial landowner—pro-Napoleon, romantic and full of idealism….

Malafrena is a remarkable feat of imagination. Background, characters and dialogue all have a fully autonomous life: there is a minimum of "period" writing and of intrusive passages of historical information to distract the reader from the plot. Despite the unspecified location—the names of places are given but we are not told where in Europe Malafrena and Krasnoy are—and the importance to the novel of political ideas, the action is both natural and convincing. Ursula Le Guin writes with such felicity that she evokes with equal assurance a family...