Publication Date: June 1, 2021
An Indie Next Pick!
A Most Anticipated in 2021 Pick for Oprah Magazine | USA Today | Buzzfeed | Greatist | BookPage | PopSugar | Bustle | The Nerd Daily | Goodreads | Literary Hub | Ms. Magazine | Library Journal | Culturess | Book Riot | Parade Magazine | Kirkus | The Week
A Best of Summer Pick for TIME Magazine | Book Riot | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | Goodreads | Bustle | Veranda Magazine | Bookish | St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Gatsby the way it should have been written—dark, dazzling, fantastical.” —R. F. Kuang
“Vo has crafted a retelling that, in many ways, surpasses the original. . . . Astonishingly crafted.”—Kirkus Reviews, **starred review**
Immigrant. Socialite. Magician.
Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.
But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.
Nghi Vo’s debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful reinvents this classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice.
Nghi Vo is the author of the acclaimed novellas When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain and The Empress of Salt and Fortune, a Hugo, Locus, and Ignyte Award finalist and the winner of Reddit’s Stabby and IAFA’s Crawford Award. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind. The Chosen and the Beautiful is her debut novel.
