Note... reading fan translation issued as a free PDF.
http://ymarkov.livejournal.com/270570.html
Great fun - a revisionist Lord of the Rings set after the defeat of Mordor, in which two Mordorians (the Orc Ranger Tzerlag and Umbarian Field Medic Haladdin) embark on a desperate plan to save their homeland (and the world) from Elvish domination, against a backdrop of power plays by Aragorn, Faramir, Galadriel and other familiar characters.
Enjoyable for a shades-of-grey morality and the endless scheming of different factions in Gondor, Umbar and Lothlorien, the book is written partly as war story and partly as spy thriller (particularly book three, a convoluted battle of wits set in Umbar's capital city). Yeskov has fun playing with the familiar orcs, trolls, elves and Nazgul but resists a simple moral inversion: while the first book introduces a Mordor that is a bastion of scientific progress in a world of barbarians, pitted against an expansionist Gondor, this soon broken down as the intrigue kicks in and we learn more about the nations involved (and Aragorn, introduced as a ruthless scoundrel, develops quietly in the background into a competent and intelligent ruler).
The main focus of the book, however, is on new characters Tzerlag, Haladdin and Baron Tangorn, with a wide supporting cast drawn from across the reimagined Middle Earth - a world alive with peoples and nations who have their own ambitions, religions and prejucides. The viewpoint skips around dozens of the minor characters, allowing detailed insight into this fully-developed world and occasionally pulling back to an unnamed historian-narrator who details the causes of the War of the Ring (which include a disastrous agricultural policy which left Mordor barren and dependent on imports to feed itself) and summaries of the major battles. Yeskov also has fun with a couple of LotR's quirks - Faramir and Eowyn's marriage and departure to Ithilien becomes a major part of the plot rather than a simple tying-up of loose ends, while Celeborn's uselessness compared to the more dynamic Galadriel is also winked at.
Extremely engaging, and a fun twist on Tolkein's world and the fantasy tropes it introduced.
(Final note: there are some grammatical errors and awkward sentences, but considering that this a freely-distributed fan translation, commendably few - and the translator, Yisroel Markov, is working on an update and has already issued a few errata.)
