The Grace of Kings

About

Two unlikely allies — a bandit and a duke — lead a rebellion against a dying empire, then discover that overthrowing a tyrant is simpler than agreeing on what should replace him. Ken Liu reimagines the founding legends of the Han Dynasty as an epic fantasy set on the archipelago of Dara, where gods meddle, airships fly, and the political questions are as sharp as the swords. Liu invented the term "silkpunk" for this novel's aesthetic — a fantasy world built from bamboo, silk, and ox sinew instead of the usual medieval European toolkit. The result is a story that feels genuinely new, drawing on Chinese historical tradition to build something that belongs to no single genre. An epic about the distance between winning a revolution and building a just world — told with the sweep of myth and the precision of strategy.