Intruder: A Foreigner Novel by C.J. Cherryh

Intruder: A Foreigner Novel by C.J. Cherryh --- 374 pages

This is the 13th volume (the first of the fifth trilogy) of Cherryh's Foreigner Universe.

The first volume of the series is titled Foreigner, and this is one series that definitely should be read in order. Cherryh is notable for creating wonderfully detailed universes and complex stories, with aliens who are so fully realized that it's the humans they encounter who often seem strange.

Bren Cameron is the paidhi-aiji for the ruler of the dominant Western Association on the Atevi homeworld where humans have been stranded for several centuries. Bren started his career as the single human mediator, fluent in both human and Atevi language and culture, who was responsible for ensuring that humans and their technology did not create catastrophic disruptions in Atevi society. But human presence and human technology, even when kept isolated and carefully monitored, has profoundly changed the Atevi world, and the pace of that change has intensified over the years of Bren's tenure.

Bren himself has become the trusted associate of Tabini-aiji, the Atevi ruler, his formidable grandmother, the aiji-dowager Ilisidi, and his precocious young heir, Cajeiri; drawn into the political intrigues of the Western Association, between atevi eager to take advantage of human technology, and atevi who wish to banish all human influence from their world. Now, following the latest attempt by political factions in the Marid, the backward and unstable southern region, to undermine Tabini-aiji's government, Ilisidi has countered with a plan of her own, offering a trade alliance to the most powerful Marid warlord, Machigi, in the hope that eliminating the isolation and poverty that has plagued the Marid will stabilize the region and unite it with the rest of the Association. Bren was dispatched to negotiate this agreement, and must now persuade Tabini and the rest of the lords of the Western Association to support Ilisidi's plan.

But Tabini has problems of his own, closer to home: his wife is about to give birth to a potential alternate heir to the aijinate, and his wife's clan is making a bid for power by exacerbating tensions between Tabini, his wife, and their son Cajeiri, who is fiercely loyal to his great-grandmother Ilisidi and to Bren. If Bren can bring off this agreement, it could begin to heal the divisions among Atevi created by the arrival of humans. If he fails, he could lose not just his position as paidhi-aiji, but his life and the lives of all the other humans in the world.