The Tangleroot Palace & other stories (Paperback)

Our summary description

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The Tangleroot Palace gathers stories that move through shadowed kingdoms, uneasy loyalties, and the sharp edges of desire. Across these tales, women navigate magic that is rarely clean or kind, shaped as much by cost as by power.

In one story, a hardened bodyguard serves a sorceress who survives by stealing other bodies, while love appears only in fleeting, borrowed moments. Elsewhere, an apprentice witch plots her escape with bone-deep determination, and a warrior returns to a changed homeland powered by strange, crystalline relics and unresolved anger. A runaway princess finds unexpected kinship among actors living at the edge of an ancient forest, where performance and survival blur.

The collection closes with a novella that draws these themes into deeper focus, lingering on revenge, inheritance, and the possibility of choosing a different ending. In The Tangleroot Palace, Marjorie Liu writes worlds that feel mythic yet intimate, where danger and tenderness coexist, and transformation often comes at its sharpest moments.