The Tiger's Daughter

Barsalyya Shefali writes a long letter to O Shizuka, heir to the Hokkaran Empire. Shefali is the daughter of a leader of the Qorin, nomads of the steppe, and the letter is the whole of the book: one woman telling another the history they share.

The two are born a month apart, and each carries a pine needle mark between the eyes. Their mothers take it as an omen of friendship for life. The Qorin and the Hokkarans have only lately stopped fighting each other, but the girls grow up side by side, and what begins as friendship becomes love.

Both girls develop powers that ordinary people do not have. Meanwhile a darkness spreads across the empire. The walls along its borders crumble, and demons come out of the forests to attack villages.

This is epic fantasy in a world drawn from East and Central Asian history, with a tender romance at its center. The violence is intense and graphic, and it serves the plot. The letter form keeps the telling personal while the scale grows large. The pace is slow at the start, then picks up once the adventure takes hold.

The book opens the Ascendant trilogy, which also goes by the name Their Bright Ascendency. The story continues in The Phoenix Empress and The Warrior Moon.