Book Synopsis

From USA Today bestselling author Nghi Vo, this all-consuming tale of ballrooms and bloodshed weds The Gilded Age with the Gothic vision of Guillermo del Toro.

Pick a face, pick a fate.

Judith Ban, former convent girl, courtesan, and failed thief, is on the lookout for her next identity. The daughter of a Vietnamese adventuress and a French naval officer, she's no stranger to risk, but she's unprepared for the secrets of New York's legendary Four Hundred, or for the women who build their power at the city's heart through blood-soaked, gold-etched rituals of demonic marriage.

In exchange for enough wealth to outrun her past, Judith strikes a deal with the matriarch of the powerful Howard family: she will stand in for the missing Howard granddaughter, who was poised to make her debut when she disappeared. With Miss Iphigenia Marshall's face stitched over her own, Judith is white, rich, and about to risk body and soul in the deadly games that determine which girls will find a match--and which will be devoured. If she can keep her wits and her life, her reward will be a husband with undreamt-of power who will be hers to command... so long as she can keep his infinite hungers fed. But to survive the season, Judith will have to seduce a storm in the shape of a man, before the night to which everything has been leading--the Scarlet Ball where the demons choose their brides.

A razor-sharp subversion of romance tropes and nightmare of manners, Vo's fusion of history and fantasy does for Edith Wharton what her acclaimed debut The Chosen and the Beautiful did for F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Review Quotes

Praise for Nghi Vo

"Nghi Vo is one of the most original writers we have today."--Taylor Jenkins Reid

"Nghi Vo is so good."―NPR on The Brides of High Hill

"A delicious bonbon of a novella about stories and their unreliable narrators, who wink at their listeners (or readers), fully expecting us to catch on."--The Wall Street Journal on Into the Riverlands

"Gorgeous. Cruel. Perfect."--Seanan McGuire on The Empress of Salt and Fortune

"So good I want to marry it."--Martha Wells on the Singing Hills Cycle

"An epic in miniature, beautifully realised."--Zen Cho on The Empress of Salt and Fortune

"I love it with the passion of a thousand burning hearts... From the old bones of an American classic, Vo has conjured up something magically alive."--The Washington Post on The Chosen and the Beautiful

About the Author

Nghi Vo is the author of Siren Queen, The Chosen and the Beautiful, Don't Sleep with the Dead, and The City in Glass, as well as the acclaimed novellas of the Singing Hills Cycle, which began with The Empress of Salt and Fortune. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, Locus, and Lambda Literary Awards and the LA Times and Ursula K. Le Guin Prizes, and has won the Crawford, Ignyte, and Hugo Awards. 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.