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by Nghi Vo
In this new standalone novel, Hugo Award-winning author Nghi Vo introduces a beguiling fantasy city in the tradition of Calvino, Mieville, and Le Guin.
The demon Vitrine―immortal, powerful, and capricious―loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot.
And then the angels come, and the city falls.
Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost―and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.
She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other's devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever.
Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again.
The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to reduce a world to ashes and remake it anew.
"Evokes the best of Italo Calvino and Ursula K. Le Guin.... This beautifully crafted tale of resilience and transformation may be Vo's best yet." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Vo has done something truly wonderful here... Their story is half the angel-demon balancing act of Good Omens, half the poetic, sensually visceral prose and enemies-to-lovers tale of This is How You Lose the Time War, all powered by Vitrine's combined grief and stubborn hope for the future of Azril." ―Booklist (starred review)
"Creates the kind of push-pull duality of This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, then adds a splash of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens to tell a romantic story about two beings on opposite sides of an eternal conflict who find common ground but never peace." ―Library Journal
"Echoing with strains of myths like a familiar tune half-heard in a distant room, The City in Glass is a treasure, as fragile as its namesake and relentless as granite, filled with exquisite sorrow, fury, and desire." ―Jacqueline Carey, author of Kushiel's Dart
"Satisfying as a leisurely stroll along the streets of some historic city, The City in Glass opens up like a treasure box to reveal glittering jewels of insight, exploring the nature of love and destruction with a sharp and delicate touch." ―Sacha Lamb, Mythopoeic Award-winning Lambda Literary Fellow
This information about The City in Glass 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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