City of Stairs is incredible! The holy city of Bulikov was built by the Divines, a gleaming metropolis of miracles that ruled over an immense empire. Ruled, in the past tense, because a man in one of the enslaved colonies made a weapon that could kill a god, and led a rebellion. Now, 75 years laters, Bulikov is an immense shattered slum, with large parts of the city's infrastructure vanished with its divine creators, and the former slaves now military occupiers. History is written by the victors, and the Saypuri victors have made it illegal for locals to know their own divine history.

When an academic conducting the first serious study of the history of the continent is murdered, it falls to Shaya Thivani, a Saypuri Operative (with a capital O), and her immensely lethal bodyguard Sigurd, to do an investigation. Shaya is a decent person worn down by the cynicism of sixteen years of intelligence work, a woman who loves history and suppresses it, a miracle worker with a library of forbidden tools, a patriot who can never return home. She faces threats from divine revanchists, old lovers, her own allies, and the shallowly buried past, as she investigates the murder of a mentor and new threats to peace.

This is a great fantasy novel, but what really elevates it is the thematic unity of history and remembering the past. Since Tolkien, fantasy has been defined by its imagined history: thousand year empires, powers inherited from the creation of the world, heroic bloodlines and the myths of a world not our own. Bennett goes meta, and turns the nature of the history into the topic of the story. How can people (singular and and the people) lead authentic lives when their origins are suppressed, distorted, or simply lost?

City of Stairs draws immediate comparisons to The Traitor Baru Cormorant (a female protagonist in spycraft) and Gladstone's Craft series (victors over dead gods). I'd rank this first book in the series above both of then. Baru Cormorant is fantastic, but as bleak and unfriendly as its titular character, and I think Bennett has an edge on Dickinson as a descriptive writer. Gladstone is glib and fun, but his magic is a blend of law, finance, and tech, with painfully obvious analogies to our own world. Miracles in City of Stairs feel appropriately strange and miraculous, with the uneven symmetry of Jungian archetypes rather than shopping-list competitionism of a D&D magic item book.

Absolutely recommended.