The Poet Empress

In the waning years of the Azalea Dynasty the emperor is dying, famine has hollowed out the countryside, and literomancy — a poetry magic in which verse written with enough truth and feeling becomes a Blessing that reshapes the world — survives only among the powerful. Wei Yin, a rice farmer's daughter who has buried five siblings, offers herself as concubine to Terren, the cruel and dissolute heir of Azalea House, to keep what remains of her family alive.

The bargain places her at the centre of a palace tipping into civil war, bound to a violent prince and surrounded by better-connected women who would rather see her dead. To survive the court — and to reach the throne — she must master a magic women are forbidden even to read, and compose the most dangerous poem of her life: a ballad of love and death.

Shen Tao's debut is a Chinese-influenced epic fantasy about power, survival and the uses of language, told through a court narrative interleaved with flashbacks to the two princely brothers whose rivalry set the dynasty on its course. A standalone novel, and a deliberately dark one: the book carries its own content warnings.