How do you love a city? Nghi Vo's The City In Glass counts the ways

In a lecture, Italian writer Italo Calvino called his 1972 book Invisible Cities "something like a last love poem addressed to the city", "a dream born out of the heart of the unlivable cities we know".

- Olivia Ho

THE CITY IN GLASS By Nghi Vo Tor/Fantasy/Hardcover/ 224 pages/$40.76

Literature since has been littered with countless such love poems to dream cities, though few manage the loveliness of American writer Nghi Vo's The City In Glass.

Vo, the Hugo Award-winning author of the Singing Hills novellas (2020 to 2023), has put marvelous twists on the American dream. The Chosen And The Beautiful (2021) is a retelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) with a Vietnamese narrator, and Siren Queen (2022) follows the rise of a Chinese-American actress in an eldritch 1930s Hollywood.

She moves now to a new milieu: the city of Azril, beloved of the demon Vitrine, who over three centuries has watched over its growth from pirate town to port city, moving invisibly among its citizens and subtly shaping their paths.