A reread for me. I finished this some time ago, but have since been to Granada, Southern Spain and the Alhambra fortress left by the Moors twice and it's interesting how that changed my views of this novel.

Kay has a special place in my heart. It's Tigana that I first read when I started reading Fantasy literature (oh right, we're supposed to call this spec fiction aren't we?) and I think I have reread that one five times over the years. I didn't really like The Fionaver Tapestry myself and can't really remember what I thought about A Song for Arbonne, other than that I liked it and there was music in it. The Lions of Al-Rassan I loved when I first read it and it was just begging for a reread.

The story follows a number of people. A Kindath female doctor, a brilliant Jaddite military commander and a brilliant Asharite diplomat/commander/poet. The story centers around the woman being torn between these men and these men being torn between loyalty to their home land and religion on the one side, and their obvious respect and friendship they have for each other. There are a number of other characters, but these three for the center in my view.
The book is set in a peninsula (read: Spain when the Moors were there), with the southern parts being controlled by Asharites (read: Moors/Muslims) and the nothern part by Jaddites (read: Christians). The parallels were so obvious, I wondered at times why Kay didn't just write historical fiction, instead of having to invent a whole continent, some cities and several religions. It would have worked as well. In some places better, since I got rather annoyed with the way he kept on trying to show how his religions were really different from the originals, and failing. I have seen and read enough of Spain under the Moors that I can't help translating everything Kay says back to what has really happened in past centuries.
Ashar was a prophet in the east, the religion spread to the west via the dessert and then jumped across the sea when they conquered the peninsula where they set up a khalifate of poet/warriors with gardens, palaces and no alcohol. Jaddites have their center of relligion in Ferrieres (France) and Batiara (Italy, with the foot cut of at the ankle) and the Kindath are despised everywhere but are aloud to live everywhere but only in a ghetto. There are cruisades, some antisemite ghetto burnings and a "reconquest" of Al-Rassan against the infidels. He might as well have called it the reconquista. It's all to obviously the same.
Asharites bow to Ashar and the stars, Jaddites have Jad the Sun God and the Asharites (The Wanderers) worship the two moons as sister to their god. The effect of having Sun, moons and stars worshipped, was to me that all gods are summarized by everything we can see in the sky. No room for any more religions, and thus a false sense of a "complete package" if that makes any sense.

The only place this element of a ficticious world really came into play (except for having two moons instead of one at some small moments as in "the blue moon was almost setting indicating a birth or death nearby and the white moon was a small crecent" ), was in the final act where the two main characters finally meet at the setting of the sun "on the brink of sun and stars". When I got there, I couldn't help thinking this one scene was the whole reason for this very round-about, in my mind then clumsy, way of world building.

I loved the way story itself is told. Some of the parts that I would have expected to see big, were just glanced over, with a full year passing between several chapters. Very well done and it kept the focus with the characters and their motivations/struggles, instead of with large (imporsonal) battles, holy wars and sociological changes. It was a personal book. It had a large number of characters (also a large number of different POV characters), but all were distinct in my mind.
The ending was heartbreaking. It did not give too much detail about what happened to who, but that's because the two main male characters were so much of a balance, it really didn't matter who wins and who loses. I will not say anymore.

I have never heard of EOS Fantasy publishers before, but it had a terrible number of mistakes in typesetting and editing. Sloppy. At one point, a group of Jaddite soldiers is ambushed in a valley. During this ambush, the scene turns into a surreally funny scene, when a woman starts yelling quite explicit things she wants to do with the Jaddite commander, saying she is "your queen Fruela". The commander is quite embarrased as there have been a lot of rumors about him and the queen. He gets mad, stops to think think clearly and makes a stupid decision. Next paragraph we go to one of our main characters and it says it was her not the queen all the time (no really?) in such clumsy wording it jarred the whole fun experience. Not sure if this was Kay or an editor that said "maybe we need to explain because our readers are stoo-pid", but a good editor would have taken that out or never put that in. (OK. I mean I would have taken it out.)

The conclusion. I loved it, though not as much as the first time. It's not high-fantasy by any means and the only real fantasy (two moons instead of one) is really only a token gesture. It's more like historical fiction, with a very interesting setup, and a moving conclusion. It's funny, clever in places and emotional.

One last thing: can anybody tell me who the last women is on the cover? I see Rodrigo and Ammar quite easily, and the woman on the right must be Jehane, but who's the woman on the left? The only real option is Rodrigo's wife, but she has only a minor part. Having only Rodrigo, then Jehane, then Ammar would have fit better thematically.
And while we're at it, who's the woman on the Tigana cover???
http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/bestselling-sci-fi-fantasy-2006/2026-1.jpg