First, Juliette Cai, daughter of the Scarlet Gang’s leader, and the successor to one of the most powerful gangs in the city. In order to set the scene, there are two major players connected to two major families in Gong’s gang-ridden version of Shanghai. Question is, to what end? The above warning of Friar Laurence to Romeo in Romeo and Juliet rings ever true: such fiery delight-a connection consumed by fire and powder-is likely to end in disaster. As tension and chaos in Shanghai builds toward a fever pitch, the two become entangled again in ways that fuel the story (to both good and middling results). Set in 1920s Shanghai, this tale of star-crossed (ex)lovers twists a knife into Shakespeare’s famous tragedy-it weaves familiar story beats with unexpected turns as Roma and Juliette, the two heirs to rival crime families, navigate intense hostilities, foreign colonizers, a strange and deadly contagion, as well as their past romance.

Unexpectedly though, it came in the form of Chloe Gong’s debut novel, These Violent Delights. Nearly a decade after taking mandatory Elizabethan-era English literature classes in university, the iambic pentameter of William Shakespeare has crept back into my life. “These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder / Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey / Is loathsome in his own deliciousness / And in the taste confounds the appetite: / Therefore love moderately long love doth so / Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.” Romeo and Juliet reimagined in a 1920s Shanghai brimming with violent gangster mayhem, a mysterious monster, and a plague-like madness. As the deaths stack up, Juliette and Roma must set their guns-and grudges-aside and work together, for if they can’t stop this mayhem, then there will be no city left for either to rule. And behind every move is their heir, Roma Montagov, Juliette’s first love… and first betrayal.īut when gangsters on both sides show signs of instability culminating in clawing their own throats out, the people start to whisper. Their only rivals in power are the White Flowers, who have fought the Scarlets for generations. At the heart of it all is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, a former flapper who has returned to assume her role as the proud heir of the Scarlet Gang-a network of criminals far above the law. The year is 1926, and Shanghai hums to the tune of debauchery.Ī blood feud between two gangs runs the streets red, leaving the city helpless in the grip of chaos.

These violent delights book