Nghi Vo Books

Vo arrived with a novella and won almost immediately. The Empress of Salt and Fortune was published in 2020, won the Hugo Award for Best Novella and the Crawford Award, and was a finalist for the Locus and Ignyte awards. It is barely 120 pages. In it, a travelling cleric named Chih and their talking hoopoe Almost Brilliant catalogue the abandoned lakeside house where an exiled empress once lived, and an old servant woman tells them what actually happened there. The whole political history of a dynasty is reconstructed through objects, and by the end you understand that you have been reading a revenge story the entire time.

The Singing Hills Cycle now runs to several novellas, including When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, Into the Riverlands, Mammoths at the Gates and The Brides of High Hill, with more announced. They are linked only by Chih, they can be read in any order, and each one does something structurally different. Tiger is a story about two competing versions of a folktale being told to a hungry audience of actual tigers. Mammoths at the Gates is about grief and the death of a mentor. The Brides of High Hill turns gothic and genuinely unsettling. The consistent thread is Vo's interest in who gets to record a story and what they leave out.

What defines her writing is compression. She will do in one paragraph what most fantasy authors need a chapter for, and she trusts you to notice. Her sentences are sensory and specific, food and cloth and weather, and she almost never explains a magic system because the magic is not the point. Her two novels widen the scope without loosening the prose. The Chosen and the Beautiful, published in 2021, retells The Great Gatsby from the perspective of Jordan Baker, reimagined as a queer Vietnamese adoptee moving through a Jazz Age America where demons are real and paper cutting is literal magic. Siren Queen is set in a version of 1930s Hollywood where studio contracts are binding in the supernatural sense and stardom requires blood, following a Chinese American actress who refuses to play the parts she is offered.

On heat, Vo sits around a 1 to 2 on our spice scale. Desire is everywhere in her work and it is frequently queer, but it is written with ellipsis rather than choreography. Scenes end at the doorway or dissolve into imagery. If you are reading for explicit content you will be frustrated. If you are reading for the specific ache of wanting someone you should not want, she is exceptional at it, and the restraint is doing deliberate work rather than dodging.

For a romantasy audience she is a candid recommendation as an adjacent read rather than a core one. There is no love interest arc structured across three books, no bargain sealed in a candlelit study, no epilogue with children. What she offers instead is a reset. If you have been reading 600-page court intrigue for months and the prose has started to blur, a Singing Hills novella takes an evening and will remind you what economical writing feels like. Her gothic instincts in The Brides of High Hill will also land hard with readers who liked the creeping dread parts of romantasy more than the romance parts.

Start with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. It is short, it is the best introduction to Chih, and if it does not work for you nothing else in the cycle will. If it does work, read Into the Riverlands next for the most purely enjoyable entry, then Mammoths at the Gates for the one that will make you cry. Save The Brides of High Hill for when you want to be uncomfortable. For the novels, Siren Queen is the stronger book and the better standalone, so start there unless you have a particular attachment to Gatsby, in which case The Chosen and the Beautiful will reward you more. Unsure whether her style suits you? Our book quiz can help you find your lane.