…ward, Best Fantasy novel It’s on the following best-of-2017 lists: Locus Recommended Reading List Amazon Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice Barnes and Noble Sci Fi & Fantasy blog The Guardian (Adam Roberts) The Verge (Andrew Liptak, Recommended Book) Fantasy-Faction SciFiNow: 35 Books you should have read in 2017 (Jonathan Hatfull) Fantasy Cafe And here’s the summary:   The multi-award winning author of The House of Shattered Wings continues her Dominion o…

…. Similarly I could write something like this. “Have you heard about the latest Metropolital exams results?” “No, what happened?” “They’re unusually good this year for the orbital.” “Oh.” Now if you don’t know what Metropolitan exam is, I’m going to have to unpack this, and why the results are good, and something about what it means to the characters, otherwise you’re just going to be very very confused. It won’t have to be a long thing, necessari…

…one story. Tangent Online reviews my story “Desaparecidos” in this month’s Realms of Fantasy: (…) her story is both well told and entertaining, and there is a nice plot twist at the halfway point (look out for the character Miguel) that does a good job of taking “Desaparecidos” in an unexpected direction I find it fascinating when the reviewer says that the story “never touches on religion”, because for me it’s very much one of my quintessential s…

…e also available via email to subscribers a week early, and subscribing is free). You can check them out here. My first two pieces are up, respectively set in Hà Nội (the exponential “e”) and Huế (Boltzmann’s constant “k”). The last story, “The Heartless Light of Stars”, which is based on the speed of light “c” and set in Sài Gòn, will be available March 14th to DSF subscribers (and will be up on March 21st on the DSF website). –“Worlds like a Hun…

…wnload, which contains the first chapter. Available in Mobipocket, EPUB or PDF. Or you can also read the first three chapters online at My Favourite Books (they were cut into five parts to make them more manageable, hence the number of links). In the silence of the shrine, I bowed to the corpse on the altar: a minor member of the Imperial Family, who had died in a boating accident on Lake Texcoco. My priests had bandaged the gaping wound on his fo…

…a preorder reward for The House of Binding Thorns. It is now available for free online in issue 17 of Uncanny Magazine. 2018 Locus Award Finalist, 2018 Hugo Award Finalist. Read Online! And if you’ve enjoyed this, you can read about further adventures of Thuan in The House of Binding Thorns. Where to Buy Hardback (US) Penguin Random House US indie stores Amazon US Barnes and Noble The Book Depository Trade Ppb (UK) UK indie stores Waterstone’s Ama…

…eneath the Mask” was published by in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and is still online at their archives. But the third one, “Safe, Child, Safe”, had only been published in print. Fear not, it’s now online as well! A snippet: I knew something was wrong with the child as soon as his father brought him to me. He was perhaps four, five years old, and everything about him was high-born Mexica: his tunic of cotton embroidered with leaping deer; his skin the…

…, in Shadow”, first published in Asimov’s, July 2010, is now available for free on my website for your reading pleasure. (and, of course, if you happen to be in the right fraction of the population, it’s eligible for the Hugos/Nebulas/Locus Awards/Asimov’s Awards etc.). Jason Sanford listed it as one of the three best novelettes in Asimov’s for 2010; so did Richard Horton; and it’s already received at least one Nebula nomination. Go here to read i…

…t Acatl feels about women, even though this was never actually required to come up in the first novel–but this helped me, even at a subconscious level, to sort out his character, and to round him into someone who would feel real to the reader. I also knew pretty much everything about Acatl’s life from his birth onwards, and most of that never made it into the novel either; but it helped me handle how he felt about his brother or Ceyaxochitl. There…

…of Sundering Flames (less than two weeks!!), you can read chapter 1 here! Come back to a Gothic devastated Paris where dragons, magicians and Fallen angels fight for dominion–and where a devastating explosion ensures that nothing will ever be the same… (also: Vietnamese dragons! Queer relationships and queer families! Creepy trees and even creepier birds! Sarcasm, flirting and murder(*)) (*)not always in that order or indeed, not always in the sa…