The City in Glass

Nghi Vo does it again in her new Hugo Award-winning novel The City in Glass, and by ‘it’, I mean delivering heart-wrenchingly vivid prose that will leave you breathless and yearning for more. Vitrine, the demon patroness and shadowy architect of the dazzling city of Azril has failed. The city has fallen beneath the cataclysmic destructive power of a group of Angels, razed to the ground and reduced to ashes.

But Vitrine managed to curse one of the angelic entities as they made their retreat, leaving him tethered to her and the rubble of her beloved city where their mistrust and hatred of each other eventually turns to fascination and understanding as they shape the city into something entirely new with their rage, their grief, and their hope.

At just over two hundred pages, it’s disconcerting how impactful this novel was on my psyche. Vo manages to impart hundreds of years of events and the entire spectrum of human emotions; whole generations of families blooming only to return to dust beneath Vitrine’s feet with the sparse but impactful composition that characterizes her storytelling style.