The Goblin Emperor

The Goblin Emperor is a fantasy novel by the American author Sarah Monette, writing under the pseudonym Katherine Addison, published in 2014. The Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel went to it, and it was also among the nominees for the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. It is a standalone novel rather than the first of a series.

Maia is the youngest and least favoured son of the emperor of the Elflands, of mixed Elven and Goblin heritage, and has spent his life in exile from a court that considers his mother's marriage an embarrassment. He was brought up away from the capital, living with an abusive cousin, so the court and its customs are entirely unfamiliar to him. Then an airship crash kills his father and his older brothers, and he is emperor at eighteen.

He has no friends, no training in court politics and a half-goblin face in a court of elves. He has to learn the protocol, the petitions and the names, work out who arranged the crash, and decide how far he can trust the people whose advice is suddenly worth taking. The novel follows the first months of his reign rather than a long war, and much of it is taken up with the ordinary business of governing.

Addison writes the court as a working bureaucracy, with titles, forms of address and factions that the reader learns alongside Maia. The book is a standalone story, and its sequels follow characters and events around the same world rather than continuing Maia's own narrative.