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The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle Book 1) by [Nghi Vo]

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Nghi Vo

The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle Book 1) Kindle Edition

by Nghi Vo (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

1,961 ratings

Book 1 of 3: The Singing Hills Cycle

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Winner of the 2020 Crawford Award!
Winner of the 2021 Hugo Award!
A Hugo Award-Winning Series!

A 2021 Locus Award Finalist
A 2021 Ignyte Award Finalist
A Goodreads Choice Award Finalist

"Dangerous, subtle, unexpected and familiar, angry and ferocious and hopeful... The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a remarkable accomplishment of storytelling."—NPR

A 2020 ALA Booklist Top Ten SF/F Debut | A Book Riot Must-Read Fantasy of 2020 | A Paste Most Anticipated Novel of 2020 | A Library Journal Debut of the Month | A Buzzfeed Must-Read Fantasy Novel of Spring 2020 | A Washington Post Best SFF of the Year So Far Pick

Named Book Riot's Best Book Cover of 2020

Named a Best of 2020 Pick for NPR | Library Journal | NYPL | Chicago Public Library | The Austen Chronicle | Autostraddle

With the heart of an Atwood tale and the visuals of a classic Asian period drama, Nghi Vo's The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a tightly and lushly written narrative about empire, storytelling, and the anger of women.

A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully.

Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.

At once feminist high fantasy and an indictment of monarchy, this evocative debut follows the rise of the empress In-yo, who has few resources and fewer friends. She's a northern daughter in a mage-made summer exile, but she will bend history to her will and bring down her enemies, piece by piece.

The Singing Hills Cycle

The Empress of Salt and Fortune
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain
Into the Riverlands

The novellas of The Singing Hills Cycle are linked by the cleric Chih, but may be read in any order, with each story serving as an entrypoint.

Praise for The Empress of Salt and Fortune

“An elegant gut-punch, a puzzle box that unwinds itself in its own way and in its own time. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Gorgeous. Cruel. Perfect. I didn't know I needed to read this until I did.”—Seanan McGuire

"A tale of rebellion and fealty that feels both classic and fresh, The Empress of Salt and Fortune is elegantly told, strongly felt, and brimming with rich detail. An epic in miniature, beautifully realised."—Zen Cho

"Nghi Vo's gracefully told debut . . . resides in the intimate margins of its (beautifully imagined) world's history, portraying how the marginalized may yet shape those narratives and harness the power of stories."—Indrapramit Das

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Print length

124 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Tordotcom
Publication date

March 24 2020
File size

2860 KB
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Total Price: CDN$10.98

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Review

"Thoroughly entertaining blend of elegant fantasy, high royalty, and political intrigue is superbly brought to life by the talented narrative skills of Cindy Kay." ---Midwest Book Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Nghi Vo is the author of The Chosen and the Beautiful, a novel reimagining The Great Gatsby, and her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, PodCastle, Lightspeed, and Fireside. Born in Illinois, she lives on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Cindy Kay is a Chinese-Thai-American narrator and educator who grew up in the California Bay Area and lives in the Rockies. Her work has been described as listening to a "cozy best friend." She narrates fiction and nonfiction, and has studied Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, and Japanese. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07VH6Y4JD
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tordotcom (March 24 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2860 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 124 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #20,713 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #56 in Asian Myth & Legend eBooks
- #95 in LGBTQ2S+ Fantasy
- #106 in Lesbian Fiction eBooks

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1,961 ratings

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Nghi Vo

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NGHI VO is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain and The Empress of Salt and Fortune, a Locus and Ignyte Award finalist and the winner of the Crawford 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.

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Customer reviews

5 star		51%
4 star		32%
3 star		14%
2 star		2%
1 star		1%

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Top reviews from Canada

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Sandy C

Pretty slow paced - not my type of book

Reviewed in Canada on February 7, 2022

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This book was very slow. There were hints at this being a wider world with deeper mystery and magic, but none of those hints really came to fruition - maybe they do in the sequels, but I'm not sticking around to find out. The pacing was slow and never quick and I did not become invested in any of the characters. They all seemed fairly shallow without any development throughout the story. For the last 1/3 of the book, I was struggling to get to the end and was happy when the last 20% was a sample chapter from another book so I could stop reading it and move on to something else.

Reviewed in Canada on May 21, 2020

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I thought the writing was a bit weak, the characters were underdeveloped, and the world was only a glimpse of something better. I might read the sequel because I want to see the writing grow but I most likely will leave these alone.

2 people found this helpful

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Anne V.

Indirect

Reviewed in Canada on January 29, 2021

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Much is said in this intense and tightly circumscribed story, but even more is implied or untold. It will be interesting to read the next book and see whether the cleric’s role expands or whether they remain observer only as in this tale.

One person found this helpful

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101mystic

A good read

Reviewed in Canada on June 8, 2020

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Quick and beautiful. The story comes together without much fuss. And the world building manages to sit in between realism and fantastical.

2 people found this helpful

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C.L.T

Good read.

Reviewed in Canada on January 29, 2021

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Overall an enjoyable story.

2 people found this helpful

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marika hirtle-lewis

Sweet short story

Reviewed in Canada on January 24, 2021

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This had lively story building in such a short story. I was immediately drawn in by the characters and world. I hope there are more stories coming from this world.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

El H

A unique novella that's impossible to put down

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 6, 2020

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The Empress of Salt and Fortune is the kind of story that gets better the more times you read it, and the more time you let it live in your head and your heart. I was surprised by the way the story was told when I first opened it, but I bought into the narrative format immediately. The story of the Empress, In-yo isn’t told first hand. Instead, historical items and mementos are carefully logged and stories told about them, and it’s through those stories that In-yo’s tale unfolds. It broke up the story into bite-sized chunks, like a fairytale, and I loved that sense of being told the story instead of reading it firsthand.

The story itself is sad and poignant. The image of a lonely Empress being exiled as soon as her ‘use’ was up and the friendship that grew between In-yo and Rabbit was beautiful. The novella is only a little over 100 pages, but the characters are beautifully fleshed out and so well developed that I felt more emotionally connected to them than characters in some novels I’ve read. The narrative is tight and concise without a single word wasted to bring the reader along on Chih’s discoveries, and left me with a sense of genuine loss that the story was over. I can’t wait for the second story in this series so I can enjoy more storytelling from Chih’s unique perspective. Nghi Vo is a writer that I’ll be insta-buying from now on.

3 people found this helpful

Greatgreenbird

Almost but not quite...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 27, 2020

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It feels as though I'm giving this book 4 stars and not 5 primarily because it's a novella and not novel-length, however I want to think there's more to it than that - in some ways, it's more about the nature of the way the story gets told, which didn't 100% work for me but I could see why the author had chosen to do it that way...

The Empress of Salt and Fortune is one of those books which initially looked like it would hit a large number of my buttons (once I'd overlooked the novella issue): non-European setting, outsider perspective and a talking bird to cap it all off. Mostly, it did what I wanted, using the main character of Rabbit to talk about what happened without ever really giving everything away as she did so and Chih as the character who gets to pick away at what doesn't quite fit. Any time there's a hoopoe involved too, I'm right there (they're one of my favourite birds), so the decision to make Almost Brilliant a bird of that species was going to be a winner all the way.

We never actually meet the eponymous Empress, only get to know her through the point of view of others: the servant who loves her, the minister who despises her for her foreignness, the items she has left behind which Chih is cataloguing. All we know initially is that she was sent from elsewhere to form an alliance, then exiled to this particular place when she had done her duty and produced a son and heir. What the author does cleverly at this stage is structure the storyline so that the outcome is inevitable but not obvious, with little details thrown in along the way to distract.

All in all, I enjoyed reading The Empress of Salt and Fortune and wished it had been longer, which is so often my lament where novellas are concerned. The other thing which didn't completely work for me was Chih's flat acceptance of everything they're told, which seemed at odds with their employment as an archivist. However, I hope the author is turning her hand to longer works and look forward to checking them out if she does. Apparently this is the first of a series, so we'll see...

2 people found this helpful

Phil

when I tell you I cried

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 15, 2021

Verified Purchase

all hail the age of the novella yet again! this packs so much history and life in just 100 pages. there is an underlying melancholy to the story, but it doesn't detract from its beauty and cleverness

Amazon Customer

Excellent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 6, 2020

Verified Purchase

A wonderful snack of a book with powerful imagery packed into each line of delicate prose. Moving and atmospheric I loved it.

One person found this helpful

Emma M

Beautiful and sad

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 9, 2021

Verified Purchase

This was a beautiful story about an Empress's and her serving girl who, with each others help, toppled and built empires.
The story is told to a Clerek, and their bird, by an elderly woman known only as rabbit.
Such a sad, sweet story, that had me in tears by the end. Yet still managing to remain somewhat hopeful, it is everything I love in a story.

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The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle Book 1) Kindle Edition

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Nghi Vo

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