Jade City

Jade City is the first novel of the Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee, published in 2017 by Orbit, and it took both the 2018 Aurora Award and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in the same year. It also appeared among the finalists for Best Novel at the 2017 Nebula Awards. The series continues in Jade War and Jade Legacy, with a prequel novella and a collection of short stories following later.

Kekon is an island that produces jade and the only people able to wear it safely, which makes the clans who control the trade a matter of national security. The Kaul family runs the No Peak clan: Lan is the eldest and the Pillar, Hilo leads its street fighters as the Horn, and their sister Shae comes home from studying abroad and wants nothing to do with any of it. Their rival is the isolationist Mountain clan and its Ayt family, whose leaders have been waiting for the Kauls to overreach.

A new drug called shine lets anyone, including foreigners, use jade, which threatens the basis of Kekon's power and the clans' hold on it. The novel follows the family business through the summer the peace breaks down, in a city where the jade trade, the police and the politicians are all connected. Lee writes the clans as businesses with employees, budgets and reputations, and the magic as a resource that has to be managed.

The Green Bone Saga is a completed trilogy, and the first volume establishes the Kaul family, the No Peak and Mountain clans and the status of jade in Kekon's politics. It is a family saga with fantasy elements rather than an epic about chosen heroes, and the later volumes move the same family into a wider war.