The Radiant Emperor

The Radiant Emperor duology reimagines the collapse of Mongol Yuan rule and the rise of Zhu Yuanzhang, the rebel commander who became the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty. Shelley Parker-Chan transforms the future emperor into a genderqueer protagonist who takes her dead brother’s identity, pursues his promised greatness and treats survival as a claim to the Mandate of Heaven. The novels combine the political fragmentation and military campaigns of fourteenth-century China with ghosts, fate and a supernatural understanding of imperial legitimacy.

She Who Became the Sun follows Zhu from a famine-stricken village and Buddhist monastery into the armies of the Red Turban Rebellion. He Who Drowned the World begins after her victories in southern China and broadens the conflict into a contest among rebel rulers, Mongol courtiers, generals and would-be emperors. Across both volumes, military conquest is inseparable from gender, desire, bodily difference and the destructive effort required to become the person history will remember.