Spotlight on: The City in Glass by Nghi Vo
I’ve been describing The City In Glass as three hundred years of grief and city planning.
It’s about a demon named Vitrine who loves a city called Azril, and what happens when angels from across the sea destroy that city. Vitrine has to decide what she does after the end of the world and what revenge she can possibly take on one of the angels responsible.
If The City In Glass was inspired by anything, it’s the end of the world and how often in your life you might be confronted with such a terrible thing. It’s inspired by what comes after the end of the world, because so far as I know, there’s always been a time after the end of the world, whether or not we’re around to see it.
― Nghi Vo, Interview, Paul Semel
What booksellers are saying about The City in Glass
- If something or someone is lucky enough, in their life they will love and be loved. The demon of Azril, Vitrine, knows what is like to love, to love her city and each person in it, to know their story as intimately as she does her own. She also knows what it is to grieve, when angels come to rain fire on her city, destroying every carefully laid stone and extinguishing every last soul. As Vitrine rebuilds her city over the centuries, accompanied by the angel who she cursed to stay with her, she learns what it is like to be loved: by the new inhabitants, and by her angel, try as she might to get rid of him. Vo’s prose sings in her latest novel, a gorgeous explosion of color and life that blooms and decays as Vitrine’s narration alternates between the Azril of old and new. At once a history, a love story, and voyage into the fantastic, The City in Glass is a genre-defying triumph.
― Sydney Mason, Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews in Chapel Hill, North Carolina | BUY
- While a demon rebuilds her beloved city brick-by-brick after its utter devastation, the angel responsible looks on, cursed to witness the destruction he caused. The years that pass between them are raw with grief and rage, but also soft with hope and new beginnings, and by the end of the book our hearts are just as wrapped up in this magical, improbable city as the demon and the angel. Every book Nghi Vo writes is a revelation, and The City in Glass is an exceptional example of her unparalleled imagination. It is diamond-sharp, sumptuous, and heady, full of luscious prose and a healthy dose of erotically-charged angel-humbling, and will stay with you long after you’ve finished it.
― Rebecca Speas, Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina | BUY
- This is a novel of feminine rage, grief, and loss. Nghi Vo masterfully asks, “Who do we become in the face of loss?” “How much of ourselves die with those we’ve lost?” and “What happens when we finally accept that loss and realize that grief is a symbol of love (a love that never fades), not loss?
― Hezekiah Olorode, Old Town Books in Alexandria, Virginia | BUY
About Nghi Vo
Nghi Vo is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas of the Singing Hills Cycle, which began with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The series entries have been finalists for the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and the Lambda Literary Award, and have won the Crawford Award, the Ignyte 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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