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I want to make a case for the Divine Cities trilogy as the most criminally underread fantasy series of the last decade. Robert Jackson Bennett has received critical praise and loyal readers, but the cultural footprint of these three books is nowhere near what it deserves. Consider this a correction.
What’s the Series About?
The Divine Cities is a trilogy set in a secondary world where gods once walked among mortals — physically, tangibly, in the form of Divinities who were worshipped and who performed miracles and demanded sacrifice. Then, roughly seventy-five years before the novels begin, they were all killed. Every single one. By a single man.
That man is Shara Komayd’s great-uncle, and as the series opens he’s the Prime Minister of the Saypuri Empire.
The trilogy is set in the Continent — formerly ruled by the gods’ civilisations, now colonised by Saypur, the nation that was once those civilisations’ slave class. The gods are dead but their miracles persist in the form of Divine constructs, buildings, and artefacts. The Saypuris have suppressed the Continent’s religions and histories. History is, as it always is, contested.
Book 1: City of Stairs (2014)
Shara Komayd is a Saypuri intelligence operative posted to Bulikov — once the greatest city of the Continent, now a fractured ruin, its architecture partially collapsed after the gods died. She’s investigating the murder of a Saypuri historian and immediately finds herself tangled in conspiracies involving forbidden history, surviving Divine miracles, and the possibility that everything she’s been taught about the gods’ deaths is wrong.
The investigation format gives Bennett a natural engine for world-revelation — Shara discovers things as the reader does — and the world he reveals is extraordinary. The history of the Continent, the nature of the Divinities, the mechanics of Divine miracles: all of it is worked out with the care of someone who has thought deeply about what it would mean for gods to be real, and then dead.
Sigrud — Shara’s bodyguard, a massive and taciturn Dreyling who is considerably more complicated than he appears — is one of the great supporting characters in recent fantasy.
Rated 4.3 Stars. Buy City of Stairs on Amazon.
Book 2: City of Blades (2016)
The focus shifts to General Turyin Mulaghesh — a secondary character from Book 1, an ageing military commander posted to an industrial port city for reasons that quickly turn out to be more complicated than retirement. She’s investigating a disappearance involving the last remnants of a Divinity of death and war.
Bennett makes an interesting choice: rather than follow Shara’s continued adventures, he uses Book 2 to examine the cost of empire from a military rather than intelligence perspective. Mulaghesh is a very different protagonist from Shara — more physical, more direct, carrying the specific moral weight of someone who has given orders that got people killed. Her arc is the series’ most emotionally difficult.
Rated 4.4 Stars. Buy City of Blades on Amazon.
Book 3: City of Miracles (2017)
Sigrud takes centre stage. The series’ culmination shifts the focus to the most action-oriented of the three books while also being the most emotionally raw — Sigrud is a man defined by loss, and City of Miracles is about what loss does to a person over decades.
The trilogy’s larger questions — about colonialism, about what history gets suppressed and why, about what gods actually represent in human psychology — come to a head here, and Bennett’s answers are satisfying in the way that conclusions earned across three books tend to be.
Rated 4.5 Stars. Buy City of Miracles on Amazon.
Why It’s Not More Famous
Genuinely unclear. The trilogy is critically praised, well-constructed, and emotionally ambitious. My best guess is that the investigation-thriller structure of the first book positions it as slightly unusual within epic fantasy — readers looking for armies and chosen heroes might not immediately clock it as the genre-defining work it is. It is, though.
Rating: 5/5 for the trilogy as a whole.
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