The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

There are plenty of fantasy stories now that focus on a city as a whole as a character. The city is the central theme in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The City of Last Chances, in Daniel Abraham’s Age of Ash, the city is practically sentient and in NK Jemesin’s Great Cities duology (The City We Became and The World We Make) many large cities are sentient. In The City in Glass, Nghi Vo takes a different tack: the city at the centre of this book Azrim, is the love child of a demon named Vitrine.

The City in Glass opens with the complete destruction of the city of Azrim by a host of angels. No reason is given but it is likely because the city itself was nurtured and grown by a demon called Vitrine. Following the destruction and in a fit of rage, Vitrine manages to infect one of the angels with a piece of herself, condemning him to stay with her, much to her disgust. The rest of the book focusses on Vitrine reflecting on the city as it was and the characters who inhabited it, and the slow rebuilding of a new city where the old one stood. Through it all is the up and down relationship of the demon and the angel.

The central relationship of the angel and the demon would invite comparisons with Good Omens but that comparison is fairly shallow. If for no other reason than Vitrine and the angel are far from classical conceptions of these beings. What is true is that the book charts their enemies to… not enemies relationship over hundreds of years as the city is slowly brought back to life. But the way the relationship develops and resolves is startling and worth the journey.

The City in Glass is an elegaic, often beautiful if melancholy book. It is suffused with sadness of what had come before and was lost. But it also infused with hope. That what was destroyed can be rebuilt, that while human lives are short they can be impactful, and that there are many different ways to love and be loved.

The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

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8.0/10