She Who Became the Sun

Genre

Fantasy & Magical Realism

Publisher

Tor Books (US); Mantle / Pan Macmillan (UK)

Publication year

2021

ISBN

9781250621801

In famine-struck fourteenth-century China under Mongol rule, a peasant girl seizes the identity, and the great destiny, of her dead brother, rising through a rebel monastery and army toward power. Shelley Parker-Chan's historical fantasy, first in The Radiant Emperor duology, won the 2022...

When famine and bandits destroy her family, a nameless peasant girl in Mongol-ruled China does the unthinkable: she takes her dead brother's name and his prophesied destiny of greatness, and refuses, through monastery and battlefield and years of ruthless striving, to let go. Shelley Parker-Chan's award-winning debut reimagines the rise of the Ming dynasty's founding emperor as a queer, gender-bending epic of ferocious ambition, following Zhu as they claw toward a throne while a brilliant, mutilated enemy general mirrors their hunger. Grounded in real history but threaded with a spare, ghost-touched magic, the novel is a study of desire, gender and the terrible cost of wanting to matter. Parker-Chan writes with cinematic sweep and psychological depth, and their morally complicated protagonists are magnetic. Comparisons to Mulan undersell its darkness and sophistication. For readers who love historical fantasy that is epic, intelligent and emotionally fierce, it is a commanding debut and the start of a superb duology.