Xiran Jay Zhao Books

Xiran Jay Zhao was born in small-city China, raised in Vancouver, and was already internet-famous before publishing a word of fiction, thanks to YouTube videos dissecting Chinese history and calling out lazy Western takes on it, including a viral breakdown of Disney's Mulan remake. Iron Widow, their 2021 debut, hit #1 on the New York Times list and became one of the loudest YA launches of its decade. The elevator pitch was irresistible: Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid's Tale, with Wu Zetian, China's only female emperor, reimagined as a teenage mecha pilot in a world that feeds girls into giant war machines as disposable co-pilots.

Zetian's story is a revenge engine. Sold as a concubine-pilot to avenge her sister, she survives the process that kills most girls, seizes power over the boys meant to drain her, and starts dismantling the system from inside the cockpit. The book also put a polyamorous triad at the center of a bestselling YA novel, Zetian, the death-row pilot Li Shimin, and the rich boy Gao Yizhi, and simply refused to treat it as controversial. Rage as fuel, history as ammunition, subtlety left at the door. Readers either love it loudly or find it exhausting. Both takes are defensible.

Heavenly Tyrant, the sequel, arrived in December 2024 and repeated the trick: instant #1 New York Times bestseller, USA Today bestseller, winner of the 2025 Aurora Award for best young adult novel and a finalist for the 2025 Lodestar Award. It trades arena battles for governance, with Zetian in power and forced into an alliance with Qin Zheng, a resurrected emperor as dangerous as anything she has fought, while the story digs into labor politics and propaganda with the same sledgehammer energy. What was announced as a duology is now a trilogy, so the final book is still to come.

Zhao also writes for younger readers. Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor, from 2022, sends a Chinese-American kid hosting the spirit of the First Emperor through a portal-fantasy tour of Chinese mythology, and it landed on bestseller lists in its own right. Across both age brackets the throughline holds: Chinese history retold with the gloves off, protagonists who refuse to be palatable, and author's notes that read like manifestos. Zhao's public persona, the cosplay, the video essays, the unfiltered commentary on publishing itself, is inseparable from the books' success, and they remain one of the few authors whose author's notes get quoted as often as their chapters.

On our 0 to 5 spice scale, figure a 1 to 2. There is real romantic and sexual tension, and the triad dynamic matters enormously to the story, but this is YA: heat is present, explicitness is not, and Heavenly Tyrant in particular spends far more time on politics than romance. Romantasy readers should come for the fury and the found-family-of-three, not for steam. Zhao matters to this shelf because they proved a love story could be structured around three people, in a bestselling YA book, without apology. The triad also matters as proof of concept, showing the love triangle could simply be resolved by refusing its premise.

Start with Iron Widow, full stop. Continue to Heavenly Tyrant knowing it is an angrier, talkier book that ends with the trilogy unresolved. If you have younger readers in your life, Zachary Ying is the handoff. And go in braced: Zhao writes with the volume at maximum, and the content warnings, misogyny, violence, abuse, suicide ideation, are extensive and earned. Pair it with the Ghibli-style patience of literally any other author afterward, because nothing else on this shelf runs at this temperature.