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by Nghi Vo
From USA Today bestselling author Nghi Vo, this all-consuming tale of ballrooms and bloodshed weds The Gilded Age with the Gothic vision of Guillermo del Toro.
Pick a face, pick a fate.
Judith Ban, former convent girl, courtesan, and failed thief, is on the lookout for her next identity. The daughter of a Vietnamese adventuress and a French naval officer, she's no stranger to risk, but she's unprepared for the secrets of New York's legendary Four Hundred, or for the women who build their power at the city's heart through blood-soaked, gold-etched rituals of demonic marriage.
In exchange for enough wealth to outrun her past, Judith strikes a deal with the matriarch of the powerful Howard family: she will stand in for the missing Howard granddaughter, who was poised to make her debut when she disappeared. With Miss Iphigenia Marshall's face stitched over her own, Judith is white, rich, and about to risk body and soul in the deadly games that determine which girls will find a match―and which will be devoured. If she can keep her wits and her life, her reward will be a husband with undreamt-of power who will be hers to command...so long as she can keep his infinite hungers fed. But to survive the season, Judith will have to seduce a storm in the shape of a man, before the night to which everything has been leading―the Scarlet Ball where the demons choose their brides.
A razor-sharp subversion of romance tropes and nightmare of manners, Vo's fusion of history and fantasy does for Edith Wharton what her acclaimed debut The Chosen and the Beautiful did for F. Scott Fitzgerald.
"A faced-paced work of glittering, bloody imagination, delivered in scathing and luxurious prose. It pulled me in, held me captive, then spat me out changed and triumphant. Utterly fantastic." ―Freya Marske, USA Today bestselling author
"After reading The Scarlet Ball, one has to wonder whether Vo is a witch herself, perhaps married not to a flood or wildfire but a demon of stories and genius. The Scarlet Ball is so utterly original, so spellbinding, so effortlessly plotted and so gorgeously written, it's hard to believe a mere mortal could write it, and yet she did, and I stand in awe of it and her." ―Johanna Van Veen, USA Today bestselling author of Blood on Her Tongue
This information about The Scarlet Ball 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.
Nghi Vo is the USA Today bestselling author of Siren Queen, The Chosen and the Beautiful, Don't Sleep with the Dead, and The City in Glass, as well as the acclaimed novellas of the Singing Hills Cycle, which began with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, Locus, and Lambda Literary Awards and the LA Times and Ursula K. Le Guin Prizes, and has won the Crawford, Ignyte, and Hugo Awards. 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.
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