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About Daughter of Calamity

Genres collide in this dark and atmospheric reimagining of 1930s Shanghai for fans of Nghi Vo and S. A. Chakraborty.

Jingwen spends her nights as a showgirl at the Paramount, one of the most lavish clubs in Shanghai, competing ruthlessly to charm wealthy patrons. To cap off her shifts, she runs money for her grandmother, the exclusive surgeon to the most powerful gang in the city. A position her grandmother is pressuring her to inherit...

When a series of dancers are targeted--the attacker stealing their faces--Jingwen fears she could be next. And as the faces of the dancers start appearing on wealthy foreign socialites, she realizes Shanghai's glittering mirage of carefree luxury comes at a terrible price.

Fighting not just for her own safety but that of the other dancers--women who have simultaneously been her bitterest rivals and only friends--Jingwen has no choice but to delve into the city's underworld. In this treacherous realm of tangled alliances and ancient grudges, silver-armed gangsters haunt every alley, foreign playboys broker deals in exclusive back rooms, and the power of gods is wielded and traded like yuan. Jingwen will have to become something far stranger and more dangerous than her grandmother ever imagined if she hopes to survive the forces waiting to sell Shanghai's bones.

ROSALIE M. LIN is a Chinese-American writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She has, at various points in the past decade, graduated with a degree in Comparative Literature, pole-danced in two Beijing nightclubs, and dropped out of a biomedical PhD program before seriously pursuing her original dream of becoming an author. Daughter of Calamity is her debut novel.

Amélie Wen Zhao is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of the Song of the Last Kingdom duology and the upcoming The Scorpion and the Night Blossom. She grew up in Beijing, where she spent her days reenacting tales of legendary heroes, ancient kingdoms, and lost magic at her grandmother’s courtyard house. She now resides in New York City, working as a finance professional by day and fantasy author by night. In her spare time, she loves to travel and spend time with her family in China, where she’s determined to walk the rivers and lakes of old just like the practitioners in her novels do.