Snow is falling on a mountain in the north, and Rujia, a goddess of healing, has finally got the upper hand. She has wrestled the Death God into the drift and pressed his own sword to his neck, and he tells her to go ahead. Then she sees what the collar of his robe had hidden: dozens of faded scars running around his throat, some from enemies and some, he admits, from his own hand. She ends the scene dabbing the fresh cut with her sleeve. To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang contains a great deal of spectacle, from shattered palaces to tidal waves, but this small, odd act of care is the novel in miniature: a healer who cannot stop healing, and a god nobody has ever treated as a patient.
A Healer Who Wants Applause
Rujia is a more interesting heroine than her gentle face suggests, and Liang knows it. Her parents were stripped of their divinity for trying to warn mortals about an earthquake, and she has spent centuries in a lonely cottage over the sea, treating gods who forget her the moment they leave. She does not want love. She wants a title, a seat in the palace and the respect her family lost. The early chapters let that hunger be slightly unattractive, which is brave in a genre that usually prefers its heroines selfless.
What changes her is not the romance, or not only. It is the moment, well into the book, when she stands in front of a mortal shrine built in her honour and watches people queue to pray to a goddess who has rarely bothered to answer them. To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang is quietly a novel about the obligations of power, and its sharpest scenes are the ones in which gods are made to look at the humans they claim to serve. The Celestial Realm, all jade steps and cranes, turns out to be crueller than the underworld. When the palace needs someone to blame for a catastrophe, it picks the daughter of exiles without hesitation, and the scene in which the court turns on her is chilling precisely because it is carried out with such polite efficiency.
The underworld, by contrast, keeps surprising her. On the night of the Ghost Festival, when the dead grow solid enough to touch, the palace ghosts come for her blood, and the god who has promised to kill her is the one who drives them off. Soon after, he arranges a dawn flight on a dragon because she once mentioned wanting to ride one. Liang is good at these sideways gestures, and they do more for the love story than any declaration.
The Death God himself is both the novel’s best joke and its saddest figure. He lives alone in a black palace staffed by ghosts, gathers souls with the weariness of a clerk at the end of a long shift, and keeps a pile of trashy mortal novels in which he seduces his way across the empire. Rujia catching him with one is the funniest moment in To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang, and his mortified summary of the plot is better still. The humour does real work: a god this touchy about his reputation is a god who badly wants to be seen as something other than a monster. A memory of his childhood, ignored by his own father and sent alone to a brutal rite in the waters of the dead, explains the rest.
Why To Dream in Darkness Belongs to the Prince
The real discovery, though, is Junyi, the Crown Prince. He first appears as a bored royal staring in horror at a hideous mural of himself, a genuinely funny scene. Then the novel tells his secret history in a run of chapters set a mortal century earlier: a prince who wanders into a brothel by mistake, asks the woman sent to him for a scary story instead of anything else, and keeps coming back for years to hear more. That romance, between a god who never ages and a mortal who tells him he will never be prettier than her, is tender and doomed and beautifully paced, and it complicates everything Rujia thinks she knows.
When the prince is later reborn as a mortal, poor, underfed and failing his exams in Nanjing, To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang finds its warmest register. The chapters told from his point of view, with their dropped buns, his drunken father and his stubborn decency, are the best writing in the book. More than once the central couple feel like supporting players in his story.
Dream in Darkness and the Problem of Too Much
The trouble with To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang is a matter of excess. Liang’s sentences are rarely content with one image when three are available, and by the second half the constant comparisons start to blur the scenes they decorate. The Death God’s conviction that he is unlovable is stated, then restated, then dramatised, then stated again, so that a character who begins as a wry, deadpan delight risks becoming a mood.
The supporting cast is thinner than the leads. The Celestial Emperor is a voice of judgement rather than a person, the mortal noblewoman the reborn prince falls for is charming but sketched, and the academy bully exists mainly to be cruel. The shape of the ending is visible from a long way off, too: once the novel shows the price of defying fate, the reader can guess roughly where the bill will fall, even if Liang’s final chapters still manage to hurt. Romance readers should know that the heat stays low, kisses and one discreet night. Those who need warnings should expect suicide and suicidal thinking, torture, child cruelty, graphic violence and large-scale death.
Ann Liang, Between Two Cities
Ann Liang has spent much of her life moving between China and Australia. She left Beijing for Australia at five, went back at ten and returned again at fifteen, and later studied history and media at the University of Melbourne, where she still lives. That doubleness runs through her young adult novels, which often follow girls who feel foreign in both of their homes, and it shows here in a different form: a Chinese myth written in English for readers who may never have heard of the Yellow Springs.
She has said that Chinese television dramas shape her storytelling, and To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang wears that debt openly. Readers who know the xianxia genre will recognise its immortal lovers, its reincarnations and its appetite for tears. Her first adult novel, A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang, drew on the same tradition. Meanwhile her YA work keeps travelling: I Hope This Doesn’t Find You is being adapted as a short-form drama, and The Lost Life of Sylvia Song is due in early 2027.
Final Thoughts
To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang, published by St. Martin’s Press on 27 October 2026 and out now, is a generous, lopsided novel whose finest pages belong to a failed scholar rather than to its gods. Readers who enjoyed the celestial court and divided loyalties of Immortal by Sue Lynn Tan will feel at home, and anyone drawn to its idea of gods who wither without worship should try Godkiller by Hannah Kaner, which takes that premise somewhere much harder. Come for the bargain with Death; stay for the boy who could not pass his exams.