How Long Does it Take For Treasure to Become Vintage? The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay
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There aren’t a lot of fantasy books that remind me of Christmas, but Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry, the trilogy that launched his fiction-writing career, is definitely one example.
I think it’s because the opening novel, The Summer Tree, was published by McClelland & Stewart in late October 1984, and by Christmas it seemed everyone I knew was talking about it. In 1984 I turned 20 years old, and started my last year of undergrad studies at the University of Ottawa. The bookstore I hung out in every Saturday was The House of Speculative Fiction, run by Pat Caven and Rodger Turner, and by December Pat — with whom I had long chats about books every week — was enthusiastically sharing the buzz about the book. “I’m told it starts slow,” she said, “but once they cross over into the fantasy world, it really picks up.”
There was a lot of attention paid to Guy Gavriel Kay’s first fantasy novel in Ottawa. He was something of a local celebrity. He was Christopher Tolkien’s co-editor on The Silmarillion, which was published to worldwide acclaim when Kay was just 23 years old. Although he lived in Toronto, where he returned to law school in 1975, and certainly didn’t hang out in any circles we knew (“He writes in a salon,” Pat told me, shaking her head), he was still Canadian. And in those days, a Canadian fantasy writer was a genuine novelty… especially a very good one, which it quickly became obvious Kay was.
