E.J. Beaton Books

E.J. Beaton came to fiction from poetry, and it shows on every page. She studied literature and writing at university and completed a PhD in English focused on creative writing. She has published a poetry collection, been shortlisted for Australian poetry prizes, and picked up a Pushcart Prize nomination. She lives in Melbourne. When she moved into fantasy, she did not leave the poetry behind, which makes The Councillor a slower and denser read than most of what gets shelved beside it and a much more rewarding one for readers who want prose that has been worked.

The Councillor, published by DAW in 2021, opens with a death. Iron Queen Sarelin Brey is gone, the kingdom of Elira is fracturing, and Lysande Prior, the palace scholar and the queen's closest friend, discovers she has been named Councillor. The job is to choose which of the city-rulers gets the throne. Lysande is a scholar, not a politician, she is grieving, and she has a private addiction she is managing badly. The book is about her learning to do political violence, and Beaton refuses to make that transformation comfortable. It is the rare fantasy where the protagonist becomes more effective and less good at the same time, and the narrative does not pretend otherwise.

What defines Beaton's writing is precision and moral discomfort. She is interested in power as a technical problem, who holds it, how it is transferred, what it costs to keep. The worldbuilding is unusually thoughtful about elemental magic as a political category rather than a superpower. Her sentences are compact and often quietly beautiful. She also writes a bisexual protagonist without making that the subject of the book, which was still notable in 2021 and remains well handled.

On heat, be honest with yourself before you start. The Councillor is a 0 on our five-point scale. There is desire in it, there is attraction that matters to the plot, and there is a genuine slow burn running through the political manoeuvring, but nothing is on the page and the romance is not the engine of the story. If you are here because you want a love story, this is not that book. If you want the political fantasy that the romantasy genre keeps gesturing at without actually writing, this is exactly that book.

She belongs on a romantasy shelf as ancestry and as a palate cleanser. A great many current bestsellers borrow the court-intrigue framework, the scholar-turned-power-player arc, and the morally gray leadership questions that Beaton actually commits to. Reading her clarifies what those books are doing and what they are skipping. She is also the right recommendation for the reader who has just finished four high-heat books in a row and wants something that will make them think rather than something that will make them blush.

A practical warning about the reading experience. Beaton writes in a register that assumes you are paying attention, and the book has a large cast of city-rulers introduced in quick succession, each with their own elemental affiliation and grudge. Readers who skim will lose the thread. Readers who slow down get one of the more intelligent fantasy debuts of its year. The poetry background also means she will occasionally stop the plot for a sentence that exists because it is good, which is either a feature or an irritation depending on your temperament. She is not writing to a page-turning formula and she is not trying to. Approach it the way you would approach literary fiction that happens to have swords in it and the pace stops feeling like a problem.

Start with The Councillor, which is the beginning of a series and works on its own for the length of one book. Go in expecting to read slowly. Beaton does not front-load exposition and the political map takes a hundred pages to settle, after which the book becomes very hard to put down. Readers who want the same intelligence at a higher temperature should look at our best fantasy romance picks, and if you are calibrating between authors, the spice scale will save you a mismatch.