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Nghi Vo's debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful reinvents a classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice.
Immigrant. Socialite. Magician.
Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society―she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She's also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.
But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.
"Vo's extraordinary full-length debut draws readers into a fantastical reimagining of the world of The Great Gatsby...The plot unravels tantalizingly slowly, and Vo's immersive prose never ceases to captivate. The Gatsby-related details and hints of magic will keep readers spellbound from start to finish." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Enter Nghi Vo's lyrical, fever-dream spin, in which golf-playing heartbreaker Jordan Baker is a queer Vietnamese adoptee with a penchant for magic." - O, the Oprah Magazine
"Beloved for her "Singing Hills Cycle" novellas, Vo goes ambitiously full-length with her tale of queer Vietnamese adoptee Jordan Baker, who uses magic to get what she wants in a 1920s Gatsby-like framework." - Library Journal
"Vo remains an excellent stylist...Recommended for readers of Vo's previous shorter work or readers of historical fantasy in general." - Booklist
"Vo's resuscitation of Gatsby suggests comparisons with Jean Rhys's celebrated Wide Sargasso Sea...[both] brilliantly elevate less-central characters, adding depth and gravitas to women underdeveloped, overlooked." - Shelf Awareness
"Decadent. Visual. Imaginative. Genius. Not enough words to praise this page-turning novel of sorcery, infernal compacts, and enchanted elixirs, in an altogether different 1920s New York. Nghi Vo snips apart, then magically weaves together a familiar story in a wholly original and decidedly unfamiliar way. Redo all the classics. And do them like this!" - P. Djèlí Clark, winner of the Alex, Locus, and Nebula Awards and author of Ring Shout
"The Chosen and the Beautiful is a subversive, sexy, atmospheric, sweltering, gin-soaked, Hell-haunted vision of Gatsby's New York, with prose that will pull you under. I loved it." - Alix E. Harrow, winner of the Hugo Award and author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January
"Crisp as paper and delirious as a fever dream, this is a redrawn Gatsby daubed in gold leaf and lip rouge and blood. Nghi Vo gives a freshly imagined Jordan Baker her due, while infusing her glittering New York with a bottomless magical menace that feels both excitingly new and cosmically true to Fitzgerald's original." - Melissa Albert, New York Times bestselling author of The Hazel Wood
This information about The Chosen and the Beautiful was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo Credit: ©2021 CJ Foeckler
Nghi Vo is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas of the Singing Hills Cycle, which began with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The series entries have been finalists for the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and the Lambda Literary Award, and have won the Crawford Award, the Ignyte Award, and the Hugo Award. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.
Name Pronunciation
Nghi Vo: nee voh
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