The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle, #1)

by Nghi Vo

History will say that she was an ugly woman, but that is not true. She had a foreigner’s beauty, like a language we do not know how to read.

“That is your calling, isn’t it? To remember and to mark down.” “It is. Sometimes the things we see do not make sense until many years have gone by. Sometimes it takes generations. We are taught to be content with that.”

unremarked, and their demise as unremarkable as surely they were not. One drunken evening, many years on, In-yo would say that the war was won by silenced and nameless women, and it would be hard to argue with her.