The International Bestselling Sequel to The Secrets of Jin-sheiFour hundred years after the events in The Secrets of Jin-shei, the Syai Empire is on the brink of civil war. A new voice preaching equality promises hope for the downtrodden, but the ensuing people's revolution brings terror, reeducation camps, and a chance of brutal retribution or even death to anyone seen as embracing the old ways.An outsider and a child of two worlds, Amais searches her ancestral home, the land of Syai, for the lost magical bond of jin-shei, the women's oath. Her quest will bring her to the very man who may destroy her and her family... and who has an improbable hold on her heart. As individuals, they are antagonists, even enemies-and yet, as two halves of a whole, they are the last hope for the survival of Syai...

The International Bestselling Sequel to The Secrets of Jin-shei Four hundred years after the events in The Secrets of Jin-shei, the Syai Empire is on the brink of civil war. A new voice preaching equality promises hope for the downtrodden, but the ensuing people’s revolution brings terror, reeducation camps, and a chance of brutal retribution or even death to anyone seen as embracing the old ways. An outsider and a child of two worlds, Amais searches her ancestral home, the land of Syai, for the lost magical bond of jin-shei, the women’s oath. Her quest will bring her to the very man who may destroy her and her family… and who has an improbable hold on her heart. As individuals, they are antagonists, even enemies—and yet, as two halves of a whole, they are the last hope for the survival of Syai…

A group of women, the jin-shei sisterhood, form a uniquely powerful circle that transcends class and social custom. They are bound together by a declaration of loyalty that transcends all other vows, even those with the gods, by their own secret language, passed from mother to daughter, by the knowledge that some of them will have to pay the ultimate sacrifice to enable others to fulfill their destiny. The sisterhood we meet run from the Emperor's sister to the street-beggar, from the trainee warrior in the Emperor's Guard to the apprentice healer, from the artist to the traveller-girl, herself an illegitimate daughter of an emperor and seen as a threat to the throne. And as one of them becomes Dragon Empress, her determination to hold power against the sages of the temple, against the marauding forces from other kingdoms, drags the sisterhood into a dangerous world of court intrigue, plot and counterplot, and brings them into conflict with each other from which only the one who remains true to all the vows she made at the very beginning to the dying Princess Empress can rescue them. An amazing and unusual book, based on some historical fact, full of drama, adventure and conflict like a Shakespearean history play, it's a novel about kinship and a society of women, of mysticism, jealousy, fate, destiny, all set in the wonderful, swirling background of Syai, a fantasy kingdom inspired by Imperial China.

The International Bestselling Sequel to The Secrets of Jin-sheiFour hundred years after the events in The Secrets of Jin-shei, the Syai Empire is on the brink of civil war. A new voice preaching equality promises hope for the downtrodden, but the ensuing people's revolution brings terror, reeducation camps, and a chance of brutal retribution or even death to anyone seen as embracing the old ways.An outsider and a child of two worlds, Amais searches her ancestral home, the land of Syai, for the lost magical bond of jin-shei, the women's oath. Her quest will bring her to the very man who may destroy her and her family... and who has an improbable hold on her heart. As individuals, they are antagonists, even enemies-and yet, as two halves of a whole, they are the last hope for the survival of Syai...

The International Bestselling Sequel to The Secrets of Jin-sheiFour hundred years after the events in The Secrets of Jin-shei, the Syai Empire is on the brink of civil war. A new voice preaching equality promises hope for the downtrodden, but the ensuing people's revolution brings terror, reeducation camps, and a chance of brutal retribution or even death to anyone seen as embracing the old ways.An outsider and a child of two worlds, Amais searches her ancestral home, the land of Syai, for the lost magical bond of jin-shei, the women's oath. Her quest will bring her to the very man who may destroy her and her family... and who has an improbable hold on her heart. As individuals, they are antagonists, even enemies--and yet, as two halves of a whole, they are the last hope for the survival of Syai...

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The epic story of a sisterhood where blood relations are nothing compared to the unbreakable bond of the secret sisters -- the bond of Jin-Shei.