#malazan

That's incredibly rare in fantasy stories; because most authors are constantly worried that they have to explain exactly how their imaginary setting works a lot of their characters tend to be knowledgeable, unbiased and truthful. When the protags enter a new area one of them will be like "this is a 700-year-old kingdom that's been under attack from the neighboring country for the last decade and it's ruled by Prince Wilbert who's fair but indecisive" and that'll turn out to be exactly accurate.

In the Malazan stories everything the characters think and say is limited by their own knowledge and colored by their opinions and prejudices. You can go three books believing some guy is evil incarnate until you meet him or get another opinion on him and it turns out that you only think that because you've heard about him solely from the POV of his love rival or some form of bigot up to that point.

The characters are constantly mistaken about others' motivations or how magic works or what the best course of action is, and it subtly demands that you constantly remember whose perspective you're inhabiting at any given moment. Together with the memory demands of the sprawling multiple locations and hundreds-strong cast, it's an intensely active form of reading a narrative.

>opens the book

>sees six pages of maps

>none are genabackis

>less than a fourth of the dramatis personae are familiar

>no captain paran, tattersail, kruppe, rallick, or whiskeyjack