Donnelly achieves her idiosyncratic characters with her richly descriptive language, but also a knack at giving them their unique voices. Despite their faults, they pull through and survive changing political landscapes and crises, or sacrifice themselves to allowing the others to survive. Each of the characters is gloriously imperfect and quirky in their own endearing ways.

After thinking a bit, I realized that it was the characters that had captured my attention, it really was like a character-driven ‘literary’ novel that just happened to be in a made-up world.

I honestly found this a bit of a disappointment, and while plowing through them I couldn’t quite figure out why I still found them to be enthralling page-turners. With its time jumps and off-stage action, the plot of the Amberlough Dossier series is not the source of its strength or success. Cordelia sits out from the trio of point-of-view characters in Amnesty, making Aristide the one constant throughout the trilogy. Due to events in the first book, Cyril is absent from Armistice, but replaced by the point-of-view of his diplomat sister, Lilian, who is merely mentioned in the first book. Aristide has found safe haven abroad as an actor, but as much as he’d like, he cannot forget or completely walk away from what he has fled. By the start of Armistice, Cordelia now leads in exile an armed opposition to the Ospies. For example, by the close of Amberlough the three protagonists (Cyril, Aristide, and Cordelia) are forced to flee the Ospie rise or stay to face its oppression with imprisonment or worse. Instead, they do a great deal off-stage and then she shows us how they respond to and survive the new situations they find themselves in as a result. This generates a thematic impression where Donnelly is not directly showing us how her characters are changing the world. The starts of Armistice and Amnesty are also marked by time jumps where significant developments in the characters and their socio-political situation have happened off-stage. As the series progresses following the Nazi-like rise of the Ospies in Amberlough, the plot and action don’t develop as one might expect, diverging from parallels to German history and the onset of a world war.

Amberlough dossier