The release date for the English version of 'Girls of Paper and Fire' by
Natasha Ngan is Nov 2018. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
Eight stunning females are selected as Paper females each year to work for the monarch. It's the greatest recognition they could ask for, but it's also the most degrading. There is a ninth one this year. She is also composed of fire rather than paper.
Lei belongs to the Paper caste, which is the lowest and most oppressed social class in Ikhara, in this intricately imagined world. She and her father live in a secluded hamlet, and she is still plagued by the trauma she experienced ten years ago when she saw her mother being abducted by royal guards and taken to an unidentified place. Now that the guards have returned, they are pursuing Lei, the girl with the golden eyes whose purported beauty has caught the king's attention.
Lei and eight other girls get weeks of training in the lavish but repressive palace where they acquire the charm and abilities appropriate for a king's consort. She performs the unimaginable there and falls in love. Her illicit relationship becomes mixed up in a plan so combustible that it ends up endangering the very way of life in her society. Even at her core, Lei is a wide-eyed country girl, but she has to choose how far she will go to get retribution and justice.