SISTER ACT

There’s sibling struggles in Mimi Yu’s new fantasy novel The Girl King…

Betrayal, magic and the fate of an empire are at the heart of The Girl King – the debut fantasy novel by Mimi Yu. The book follows Lu and Min, two sisters with very different approaches to life, who are forced to take desperate measures when Lu is passed over for the throne…

“The kernel of the book came to me as a teenager, daydreaming in class,” says Yu. “Two enemies, a girl and a boy, meet in a forest and emerge as allies. I knew I wanted to build a world that could help expand the milieu of the overall SFF imagination – for diasporic Asian readers, for readers of colour, for the reader I’d been as a child, devouring books containing elves and shapeshifters, but rarely featuring a character that looked like me.” Inspired in part by East and North Asian history, as well as the present day, Yu says that The Girl King is about “depicting and analysing power, especially as it operates in a web, rather than along a single line. Hand-in-hand with power also comes trauma. Many of the characters illustrate how empires subjugate people, not just physically, but also psychically, even in the most intimate relationships.”

While writing the novel is the fulfilment of a lifelong dream for Yu, it’s only the start of the story, with a sequel planned for release in 2020. WS

The Girl King is published by Gollancz on 10 January.