This month I’m recommending a Hugo Award-winning series of novellas – The Singing Hills Cycle by American author Nghi Vo. The first to be published was The Empress of Salt and Fortune (2020), followed in the same year by When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain. Don’t those titles immediately make you want to read them? A further story, Into the Riverlands, was published in 2022 and a fourth installment Mammoths at the Gates is promised for later this year (2023). All the novellas are available in print or as ebooks but I think the audio versions work particularly well. The author stresses that these novellas can be read independently or in any order.

I found it impossible to pick just one of these novellas so I’m treating them as a series of short stories and describing all three. There are several important links between these novellas: they are all set in an Asian-based world invented by Vo, they all share a central character – young Cleric Chih – and they all explore the stories we tell ourselves and others. Chih was brought up in the Abbey of the Singing Hills but their mission is now to wander the world recording oral history. To assist with this mission, Chih is usually accompanied by the neixin Almost Brilliant, an intelligent creature with an eidetic memory who takes the form of that most implausible of birds, the hoopoe. It seems completely appropriate that Chih is non-binary, which helps them to be a neutral observer.

In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Chih and Almost Brilliant have been sent to visit a palace on the shores of Lake Scarlet which was once inhabited by the recently deceased Empress of Salt and Fortune. While the Empress was alive the place was magically protected by ferociously hungry ghosts but now the ghosts are fading and Chih and Almost Brilliant are able to get by them. They expect to find the palace deserted but discover an old woman called Rabbit who tells them that she has just come back to Lake Scarlet after 60 years away. Chih isn’t sure that the old woman is as harmless as she seems but they soon become fascinated by Rabbit’s stories about her early life as a humble servant of the late Empress.

The Empress came from the North to marry the Emperor of Anh near the end of the eternal summer. The Emperor treated his `barbarian’ bride with cynical cruelty and banished her to Lake Scarlet as soon as she had given birth to a male heir. Rabbit tells Chih how the Empress first noticed her and how she came to know the enigmatic Empress as well as anybody could. During her banishment, the Empress appears to be a helpless prisoner but she never stops working to regain her freedom. Rabbit’s loyalty to her mistress will cost her dearly but she is a witness to the downfall of an Empire and the foundation of a new dynasty. By the end of their stay in the haunted palace, Chih and Almost Brilliant have learned a secret too dangerous to tell.

This novella has a wonderfully eerie atmosphere and it is never quite clear whether brave and practical Rabbit is already a ghost or simply an old woman ready for death. Other writers might have turned the plot of The Empress of Salt and Fortune into a massive Epic but Vo conjures up a whole world of exquisite beauty and devastating cruelty by shaping a narrative around the memories evoked by objects which Rabbit finds in the palace that was once her home. A golden mammoth figurine recalls a brief episode of sensual pleasure for the Empress while a box of black salt is shown to have been a crucial signal to the exiled Empress to set her plan in motion. There are acts of violence in the story Chih pieces together which are as terrible as anything that happens in Game of Thrones but Vo treats them with subtlety and restraint. This makes them linger in the mind, especially when the story focuses on the sufferings of ordinary people, such as Rabbit and her lover, caught up in imperial intrigues. Rabbit’s servant’s-eye account of events teaches Chih, and us, to see history differently.

In The Tiger Who Came Down From the Hills, Chih is travelling on their own while Almost Brilliant is sitting on a clutch of eggs. Chih persuades mammoth-riding scout Si-yu to give them a lift to a way-station in the mountains but when they arrive they find that the station has been attacked by were-tigers and the old man in charge has been seriously injured. Si-yu manages to get everyone into the relative safety of a barn, with her young mammoth blocking the entrance, but the three tigers do not leave. The leading tigress, Ho Sinh Loan, demands her prey back but Si-Yu refuse to give up the old man. To distract the tigress from her threats to eat them all Chih mentions collecting stories about other tigers, including a famous one about a tigress who fell in love with a young woman called Scholar Dieu who was travelling to the capital to take part in the Imperial Examinations. Chih describes the dangers of Dieu’s journey and her efforts to get rid of the tigress who followed her down from the mountains. Ho Sinh Loan keeps interrupting and retelling events from the tiger point of view. Can Chih spin out the story of this unusual love affair long enough for rescue to arrive?

This novella has a darkly humorous tone. I missed the good-natured bickering between Chih and their highly opinionated neixin but there is a cute mammoth to enjoy. The tigers are genuinely scary, both in their animal and their seductive human forms, but they make fascinating company. The story within a story is full of grotesque incidents – at one point Scholar Dieu is forced to choose between marrying a corpse animated by a Fox Spirit and allowing herself to be rescued by an amorous tigress who might devour her at any moment. At first it seems obvious that our sympathies ought to lie with the intelligent young woman struggling to succeed in a male-dominated society but as Dieu betrays her rescuer, the tiger version of the story becomes more persuasive. Early in the novella, Si-Yu demands to know why they are talking to the enemy tigers and Chih’s answer is because the tigers are talking to us. This novella demonstrates how enlightening it can be to listen to representatives of other cultures and to understand how events and motives can be interpreted very differently by them. Besides, given the options of a dull job in government or running away with a tigress I know which I’d choose…

Chih and Almost Brilliant are back together in Into the Riverlands facing a journey through bandit-country to the coastal town of Betony Docks. During a brawl at an inn, Chih meets an odd pair: brilliant martial-arts practitioner, Wei Jintai, and her qentle sworn sister, Mac Sang, and an older couple, forceful Lao Bingyi and taciturn Khanh. Lao Bingyi persuades the others to travel with her on the mountain road to the coast. Chih’s mission is to find out what the locals think about the martial legends for which the Riverlands are famous. As the journey progresses Chih is told many, sometimes contradictory, stories about local heroes and villains and has a frightening encounter with the sinister sect of the Hollow Hand. Chih begins to wonder about the past history of the older couple and when the travellers arrive in Betony Docks a desperate situation reveals old secrets.

This is the most complex of the three novellas. As soon as I’d finished it, I went back to the beginning for a careful reread because the last scenes made me see the characters in a different light. Vo has clearly been inspired by the famous Chinese legends of the outlaw-heroes of the Water Margin and I think I can also detect the influence of Zhang Yimou’s brilliant film Hero (2002). During a journey that may not be as perilous as it seems, Chih is told some very odd myths and variants of well-known legends in which the same outlaws are sometimes the villains and sometimes the heroes. It all depends on your point of view.

Early in the novella Chih gets a lesson in not judging people by appearences when dainty silk-clad Wei-Jintai turns out to be the deadly fighter while the large young woman in peasant clothes is the clever and sensitive one. Wei-Jintai touchingly insists that her beloved Mac Sang is the most beautiful and brilliant person she has ever met. Throughout the story, Vo challenges conventional ideals of beauty and the traditional story-motif of the beautiful woman in peril who is just there to be rescued by a hero. Most of the women in this novella have much more dynamic ideas about their roles in life though Vo also questions what the long-term effects of martial superpowers would be on a person’s humanity.

Vo is right to say that each of these novellas can be read independently because her world-making is so skilled that a few perfectly chosen details provide all the background needed to understand the story. There are no dull passages of exposition. Every beautifully crafted sentence earns its place and information is offered in novel and interesting ways so that the reader learns alongside Chih and Almost Brilliant. We are told that the order of The Singing Hills is more about history than religion and Chih doesn’t claim to be particularly pious. During Into the Riverlands, Chih sometimes has to stop being a detached observer and listener and behave more like a proper cleric to give comfort to the living and the dead. In general though Chih is a perfect everyperson figure so that any reader can step into their sandals and experience Vo’s world through their eyes and ears. I very much look forward to the further adventures of Chih and Almost Brilliant. Until next month….

Geraldine