Nghi Vo
At a glance
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.
A demon. An angel. A city.
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.
"Echoing with strains of myths like a familiar tune half-heard in a distance 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
"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 🌟"
From the topmost tower of the observatory to the floating docks on the beach, the city of Azril lit up with paper lanterns, with candles, with girls throwing flaming knives and boys in firefly crowns, with passion, with desire, with hatred, and with delight.
When Vitrine first arrived, Summersend had been a fast, a time when the people of Azril kept indoors with black flags hung over their windows and ate dry bread dusted with salt as a reminder of flesh and the sea. Perhaps some, particularly devout, stood in the squares and mortified themselves with grief and goat-hair shirts, but it was a lackadaisical kind of fervor even then. Vitrine had looked into the dour heart of the penance and found within it sparks she could coax to life, nursing them over the glass cabinet in her chest until they glowed. As tender as a demon could be, she nourished them on good years and bad, on silks brought from Kailin and barrels of oysters from Brid. She fed the festival on her own blood and her own laughter until it bloomed like a bonfire.
Now, right before the end, the city threw up towering light and shadows as long as dragons, and the only remnant of the black mourning flags were the colorful veils that the...
