Katherine Arden's The Unicorn Hunters: How I got drawn into a medieval duchess's gambit

By Andy — 2026-06-27 — fantasy books adults

I picked up The Unicorn Hunters because of Arden's track record with the Winternight trilogy. She has this gift for finding the seams between what actually happened and what people believed was lurking in the dark.

Anne of Brittany was nineteen in 1490. A duchess. Sovereign in her own right, which meant she was also a target—France wanted to swallow her realm through marriage, the way empires do, by making her marry King Charles VIII and calling it love.

That's the real part.

What Arden does with it is something else. Anne arranges a secret proxy marriage to Maximilien of Austria—heir to the Holy Roman Empire, as far as I can tell, the kind of alliance that actually shifts the board. Then she uses a hunt in the enchanted forest of Brocéliande as cover. The forest itself, historically tangled up with Merlin and faerie queens, actually—well, more or less repels divination. Makes it hostile to magic-reading and prophecy. So her enemies can't spy on her moves.

The scheming works because the magic is real.

This is where Arden does the thing she's always done well. She doesn't make you choose between the political crisis and the enchantment. Both are true. Both matter. The novel landed on the New York Times list, USA Today, Indie—all of them, within weeks of June's release. Not because it's clever about threading these two worlds together, but because it actually understands that they were always the same world, just with different names for the same desperation.

The scheming is meticulous. The prose is clean. And if you're the sort of reader who gets interested in how a nineteen-year-old girl outmaneuvers empires by understanding that everyone else is looking at the map wrong, you'll want to read this.

That's the whole thing, really.