Provenance by Ann Leckie

Ann Leckie returns to the world of her record-breaking Imperial Radch trilogy, which won the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards, with an enthralling novel of power, privilege, and birthright. NOMINATED FOR THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL 2018 NOMINATED FOR THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL 2018 A power-driven young woman has just one chance to secure the status she craves and regain priceless lost artifacts prized by her people. She must free their thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned. Ingray and her charge will return to her home world to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray's future, her family, and her world, before they are lost to her for good. For more from Ann Leckie, check out: Imperial RadchAncillary JusticeAncillary SwordAncillary Mercy

I quite enjoy it when authors take you into there previously established worlds from another angle. Ann Leckie is doing exactly that in Provenance. Here we enter the universe that was established in the original Imperial Radch trilogy, but we have new characters, new worlds, new politics. The events told previously are obliquely referenced and seem to be occurring somewhat concurrently, but we follow the goings on in a minor backwater system with its own petty squabbles on a different scale.

Here we follow Ingray, minor scion of an important family trying to secure her status and inheritance by rescuing a con artist from prison. But when she does so she ends up engaging the services of a captain running from a reclusive species and dragged into a conflict between her home world and one of its neighbours. Full of the same clever political machinations that typified the earlier Imperial Radch stories this is an intriguing companion novel. Separate but interlinked, sharing all the same DNA and telling a pretty enjoyable tale in the process