The Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo follows the cleric Chih of the Singing Hills as they travel the land to tell and record stories.
To date, the series is a trilogy of three novellas. Each can be read standalone.
- The Empress of Salt and Fortune
- When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain
- Into the Riverlands
The Singing Hills Cycle provides examples of these tropes:
- Ambiguous Gender: Chih's pronouns are they/them.
- Asian Fox Spirit:
- Dieu nearly fell victim to a family of foxes, who had taken the identity of a well-to-do family. They attempted to marry their youngest son to her, but are foiled by the appearance of Ho Thi Thao.
- Rabbit, upon seeing Mai again in the capital, unchanged after many years, muses that perhaps Mai "was a fox girl after all, come to bedevil an empire when it was at its most fragile". This refers to the myths about huli jing possessing Emperors' favorite concubines in order to topple regimes, such as Daji or Bao Si.
- Bald Mystic: Chih's head is shaved, and they are a cleric of the Singing Hills.
- Girls With Mustaches: Chih speaks to Dong Trinh, a bartender with a thin wispy mustache, about her family history.
- Humanshifting: Tigers can shapeshift into humanoid form and talk with humans. However, they retain Uncanny Valley animal qualities, and the more they lose control, the more animalistic they become.
- Interspecies Romance: Between Ho Thi Thao, a tiger, and human scholar Dieu.
- Talking Animal:
- Almost Brilliant is Chih's avian companion, a neixin who is a hoopoe.
- Tigers can take human form, but they can also speak as tigers.
- "Rashomon"-Style: When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain has the framing device of Chih telling the story of Ho Thi Thao and Dieu to the three tigers, the human version of the story, and the tiger version. After Chih finishes a segment of the human version, the tigers tell the counterpart segment in the tiger version.
