Ursula K. Le Guin's final novel gives voice to Lavinia, the almost-silent bride of Aeneas in the last six books of Virgil's Aeneid — a woman the poem grants barely a line of her own. In Le Guin's telling, Lavinia narrates her own life: her girlhood in Latium, the omens that mark her as destined for a foreign husband, and her arrival at a fraught peace when Aeneas and his Trojan survivors land on her father's shores.
Throughout, Lavinia holds conversations with the dying poet Virgil himself — a spectral, self-aware presence who tells her what he wrote of her and what he left out — before war breaks out between the Latins and Trojans, ending in Aeneas's single combat with Turnus. Lavinia marries Aeneas, bears his son Silvius, and after Aeneas's early death must protect her son from his jealous stepbrother Ascanius.
Because her role in the Aeneid was too slight to grant her full mortality, Lavinia cannot fully die either — the novel closes with her passing into legend as an owl haunting the sacred wood of Albunea. Spare, formally inventive, and deeply attentive to a woman written out of her own epic, Lavinia is Le Guin's meditation on story, authorship, and the lives left in the margins of the ones we tell.