“A Song to Drown Rivers” by Ann Liang is our pick for October’s “GMA” book club

A Song to Drown Rivers by New York Times and indie bestselling author Ann Liang is our pick for October's GMA Book Club.

Liang's new novel is a love story that transcends time and place and is inspired by the legend of Xishi, one of the famous Four Beauties of ancient China.

The story is about Xishi, whose beauty is seen as a blessing to the villagers of Yue. She eventually catches the attention of a famous young military advisor, Fanli, who, according to a synopsis, offers her “a rare opportunity: to use her beauty as a weapon… one that could overthrow the rival neighboring kingdom of Wu.” Improve the lives of her people and avenge the murder on her sister.

“All she has to do is enter the enemy palace as a spy, seduce their immoral king and weaken him from within,” the synopsis reads.

“Trained by Fanli in everything from classical instruments to concealing emotions, Xishi refines her beauty into the perfect blade. But she knows that Fanli can see through every deception that controls her and the attraction between them destroys all untruths,” the synopsis continues.

Set in an empire where two kingdoms were divided by ancient grudges and unyielding borders, Liang says the novel features stories of femininity, war, sacrifice and love against all odds.

Read an excerpt below and get a copy of the book here.

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A Song for Drowning Rivers by Ann Liang

This month we're also partnering with the Little Free Library to distribute free copies in Times Square and 150 locations across the U.S. and Canada. Since 2009, more than 300 million books have been shared in Little Free Libraries around the world. Click here to find a copy of “A Song to Drown Rivers” at a Little Free Library location near you.

Read with us and join the conversation all month long on our Instagram account @GMABookClub and #GMABookClub.

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Chapter One

It is said that when I was born, all the wild geese flew from the sky and the fish sank into the waves because they had forgotten how to swim.

Even the lotuses in our gardens trembled and turned their heads, ashamed that their attraction had waned in my presence.

I've always found such stories ridiculously exaggerated, but they prove the same thing: that my beauty was something unnatural, beyond nature itself.

And this beauty is not so different from destruction.

Because of this, my mother insisted that I cover my face before leaving the house.

“Don’t draw unwanted attention to yourself, Xishi,” she warned, holding up the veil. It curled and shone in the midday light, the edges glowing white.

“It’s dangerous for a girl like you.”

A girl like me.

There were a thousand meanings in those words and I tried not to think about them, even as the old memories bubbled up in response.

The cackling, red-cheeked village aunts who once came to visit and were amazed at the sight of me. “She’s so pretty,” one of them had murmured.

Someone of such exquisite beauty – she has the power to topple kingdoms and destroy cities. She meant it as a compliment.

Another had tried to introduce me to her son, who was three times my age, worked as a lumberjack like my father, and had a face that reminded me of a bitter gourd.

“Come here,” said mother.

I stepped forward and let her wrap the veil around my head, feeling her thin, calloused fingers—worn from scrubbing raw silk by day and scrubbing rusty woks by night—playing with the strings.

The fabric fell gently over my nose, my lips, my chin, cooling against the humid summer heat.

I supposed I should be grateful for her desire to protect me from outside scrutiny.

Zhengdan's mother almost dragged her out into the street, flaunting her good looks for everyone to see. And it worked.

Seven men from our village were already standing on her doorstep, bringing lavish gifts and begging for her hand in marriage. It was Zheng-dan who told me this late at night, her mouth twisted in disgust and her hand clenched into a fist beneath mine.

“I'll come back before it gets dark,” I promised Mother, who I knew would be worried long before then, even though the river was not far from our western corner of the village and I had walked the same path countless times was.

But girls like me were sometimes missed. Although “missing” was too soft a word for it.

The truth was even uglier: stolen, slaughtered, sold. Traded between men like rare porcelain.

This was especially true in these days when the wounds of war were still fresh in our kingdom, the Wu was breathing down our people's necks, and our remaining soldiers were too exhausted and few and far between to care about trivial things like dead girls could care.

“Come back as soon as you can,” Mother urged, pushing a roughly woven bamboo basket full of bales of silk into my arms.

I walked through the village alone and alert. The long veil tickled my cheek and soon clung to me with sweat, but it helped block the less pleasant smells of goatskin, dirt, and undercooked fish.

Around me, most of the houses were still in ruins, with gaping holes in the walls that looked like puncture wounds or cracked stones strewn across the yard like skulls.

There were black marks in the earth from when the Wu soldiers had come, fires blazing, swords swung, and the blood of our people dripping from their hands.

The scene was as fresh in my mind as ever, less a memory than a haunting experience. Sometimes at night I thought I saw ghosts floating above the yellow dust paths.

All the villagers who hadn't survived.

A door creaked to my right, pulling me back to the present.

Voices came through the cracks. A man chopped up thick slime. I moved faster, the basket pulled close to my chest.

As always, I heard the river before I saw it. The steady, song-like rippling of the water, accompanied by the call of geese from beyond the trees, its blue-sweet scent is a relief.

Then the elms parted to offer a clear, breathtaking view of the riverbank, of the grass heaving and swaying in the wind, and of the smooth pebbles scattered around the edges, patterned with white and gray spots like quail eggs .

The place was empty except for me – and I was glad about that. I had always enjoyed the sound of my solitude, the stillness of my own breathing.

When I was with other people and felt their eyes on me, I often had the strange, invasive feeling that my face and my body didn't belong to me. As if I had been created solely for the pleasure of their contemplation.

I slowly unrolled the first bale of silk from the basket and dipped it into the cool river water. Once, twice, again.

Then I wrung it dry as the water ran in little rivulets down my wrists.

The task looked easy, but it was more difficult than most people knew.

Unwashed, the silk felt rough on my skin and left pink blisters; After washing it was so heavy that it weighed on my arms like sheepskin.

I took short breaks in between to catch my breath and relax my muscles.

Using one hand, massage the delicate skin above my heart.

The stranger stories claim that my mother was washing silk on this river when she was struck by a pearl and soon became pregnant with me.

In these stories I am reduced to someone barely human, a creature of myth, but at least they would explain my poor health since childhood, the pain in my chest that occasionally subsided but never completely disappeared.

Sometimes I imagined that there was a crack in my heart that I couldn't close despite all my attempts.

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“A SONG TO DROWN RIVERS,” published by St. Martin's Press, copyright 2024 by Ann Liang.