Chloe Gong Books

Chloe Gong wrote These Violent Delights while she was still an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, sold it before graduating, and watched it become a number one New York Times bestseller while she was finishing her double major in English and international relations. Born in Shanghai and raised in Auckland, New Zealand, she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2024, and her books have been published in over twenty countries. Few careers in modern fantasy have started this fast or this young.

Her trademark is Shakespeare with knives. These Violent Delights (2020) reworks Romeo and Juliet into 1926 Shanghai, where Juliette Cai, heir to the Scarlet Gang, and Roma Montagov, heir to the rival White Flowers, face a blood feud, a monster in the Huangpu River and a madness spreading through the city. Our Violent Ends (2021) closes that duology. The follow-up pair, Foul Lady Fortune (2022) and Foul Heart Huntsman (2023), pulls As You Like It and Hamlet into 1930s espionage with Rosalind Lang, an assassin who cannot die, faking a marriage while hunting a traitor.

In 2023 she made the jump to adult fantasy with Immortal Longings, an Antony and Cleopatra riff set in the twin cities of San-Er, where body-jumping contestants fight in a lethal royal tournament. It hit the New York Times and USA Today lists, Vilest Things (2024) continued the story, and Eyes of Kings completes the Flesh and False Gods trilogy in August 2026. She has also launched a cyberpunk direction with Coldwire (2025), whose follow-up Deadlock arrives in 2026. She writes fast, sells everything, and shows no signs of slowing down.

Heat check for shelf placement: the YA Shanghai books sit around 1 on the spice scale, all tension and tragedy, while Immortal Longings and its sequels run hotter, a solid 3, with explicit scenes powered by mutual distrust. The adult books are also considerably more violent, so the jump from Juliette to Calla is bigger than the covers suggest.

For romantasy readers, Gong is the patron saint of doomed forbidden love. Rival heirs, fake marriages, assassins falling for their targets: she runs the canon plays with total sincerity and a body count. Her romances never float free of politics, which gives the longing actual weight, and her enemies-to-lovers arcs come with the rare guarantee that both parties might really pull the trigger.

Part of Gong's appeal is that her retellings are load-bearing, not costume parties. She keeps the bones of the source plays, the feud, the faked identities, the political rot, then lets 1920s Shanghai do transformative work: the blood feud maps onto gang territory carved up alongside foreign concessions, and the monster plot in These Violent Delights literalizes the contagion imagery Shakespeare only gestures at. Her Shanghai is specific, researched and unromantic about colonialism, which grounds even her pulpiest set pieces. She has also been unusually generous to her readership between books, with novellas and companion pieces expanding the Secret Shanghai world, and her online presence made her one of the first authors whose career was visibly built in public, book by book, while her original TikTok audience grew up alongside her into her adult novels.

Start with These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends read back to back, since the first ends on one of YA's most notorious cliffhangers. Foul Lady Fortune works as a second course in the same world. Adult readers who want the spice and stakes turned up can go straight to Immortal Longings without reading the YA books at all, and with Eyes of Kings out in August 2026 the whole trilogy is finally bingeable.