Second paragraph of third chapter:
To be fair to Guet Imm, she was less useless than most Pure Moon devotees. She managed to part the men from their filthy clothes and launder them, in the teeth of the men’s appalled resistance. She also proved handy with a needle, skilled at leech removal, and knowledgeable about where to find herbs to keep off the mosquitoes.
This just missed the Best Novella Hugo ballot in 2021 so I hadn’t previously got around to it, but spotted it in London in March (I think in the Piccadilly Waterstone’s) and grabbed it. It’s a rollicking tale of a nun who turns to banditry in a country which might be a pre-modern version of Malaysia. I slightly wondered whether to classify it as fantasy at all, but it’s close enough to wuxia in spirit, and the world is definitely not quite ours. Great fun. You can get The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water here.
