The only book that comes close is Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History, and even so, that’s doing very different things, and has very different central concerns. I can’t think of another novel that attempts the same kind of re-imagining, and especially not such a queer re-imagining. It is this revisioning of history as queer that, along with the presence of ghosts and the literal manifestation of the power of the Mandate of Heaven as a coloured flame – power given presence – in its pages, renders She Who Became the Sun into something mythic and transcendent, practically unprecedented in historical fantasy.

But that brother dies, and Zhu – ambitious and desperate for survival – adopts his identity, determined to fool fate itself. But rather than a fictionalisation of the rise of the first Ming emperor, Parker-Chan offers a sweeping queer re-imagining of this episode in history, for we first meet Zhu as a starving girl-child in a peasant village, whose brother is foretold to have a great destiny. Its main character, Zhu, who spends most of the novel known as Zhu Chongba, is the same figure that history knows as the Hongwu (“vastly martial”) Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty. It sets itself in China in the middle of the 14th century, in the failing years of the Yuan dynasty (the empire of the successors to the khanate inherited by Möngke Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson). She Who Became the Sun is Shelley Parker-Chan’s debut novel, and it is an astounding first effort.

Shelley parker chan