Ai Jiang’s much-awaited A Palace Near the Wind, her sophomore novella to the Nebula award-winning Linghun (Dark Matter INK, 2023), released in 2025. Touted as “a powerfully imaginative, compelling story of a young woman seeking to save her family and her home, as well as a devastating meditation on the destruction of the natural world for the sake of an industrial future,” Jiang’s latest does not disappoint. In preparation for hosting the book’s launch event in Toronto, I read an ARC for Palace and immediately gravitated to this imaginative world—the intersection of natural and industrial is where Jiang’s artistry takes flight. During the event at Little Ghost Books, we barely scratched the surface of her inspirations. A month later, we sat down once again, sans audience, and discussed her whisky flight of inspiration. Disclaimer: there was no whisky involved, only savoury and sweet treats.
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MR: You’ve created a dreamy, visual aesthetic in this book. What influenced you in creating this world?
AJ: I watch a lot of fantastical anime; I drew a lot from that before Palace. Specifically, I wanted Studio Ghibli vibes with the vibrant colours, almost surreal characters, and exaggerated, over-the-top kind of villains. You know that kind of thing? And noble main characters. But then I also wanted a stark contrast with the palace and industrialism with the humans in it. So, you have a very vibrant colour palette versus a more muted, greyscale palette. I really like the dichotomy of the industrial and then the Woodland vibes.
MR: A major theme in this book is the differing philosophies between ecology and industrialization. Why was this a topic you wanted to explore?
AJ: I studied English literature, so most of my background comes from the classics. It’s a lot of realist fiction or contemporary fiction. Very little sci-fi fantasy, but I did take a course at the University of Toronto where the type of fantasy we read was Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. That book is the one that I remember the most. I think it’s marketed as YA but it feels very mature. It’s a young character who’s going through a very internal journey that is directly connected to the magic system that is presented to the readers. When I was writing Palace, that is similar to what I had in mind, an interior journey that is directly connected with the environment at hand—the transformation is caused not by the magic system, but the environmental changes in the book.
MR: Did you take any inspiration from the real world?
AJ: My grandmother’s village back in my hometown in China is six interconnected villages. They’re very, very old. They got torn down and condos were built in their place. Now, it’s all high rises and the community is a very different dynamic because before, when you lived in a village, you could see everyone’s homes through the windows. So you’d just be like, “Oh, I just saw something I shouldn’t have seen.” When I was writing Palace, a lot of the hollows, the homes of the Wind Walkers, are like that. They are trees with shifting exteriors where you can kind of peek inside based on how they shift. Whereas in the castle there are isolated rooms and air hallways. These rooms are pretty similar in how they’re constructed. All the doors look the same, similar to the condos. All the units are pretty similar. Maybe you would decorate it slightly differently, but then they’re also separated by floors. You can’t just peek your head into someone’s window and say hi.
MR: You’ve created a unique and deeply imaginative species of characters, but they feel familiar all the same. What influenced you in their creation?
AJ: A book influence for my writing in general is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. People have said in reviews—which is very interesting because when the movie adaptation came out, none of the characters were Japanese—how all the characters hold very Japanese values. So when I was writing Palace, the characters are not Chinese, but they are Chinese at the same time. If that makes sense. So when people ask, “Oh, they’re fantastical tree creatures, why do they have Chinese names?” I guess because it’s almost like a sense of familiarity too—I still draw on what I am familiar with in creating them.
MR: This story centres around family, duty, and honour, but also independence and determining your own fate. How did these themes take shape as a story?
AJ: In terms of family, I was thinking a lot about the different decisions that we make, even though it feels like we should be making the same decisions based on our worldview, traditions, and upbringing. Sometimes you see families who are quite harmonized. They’ll be like, okay, this is how I was brought up, so I would make pretty similar decisions to my parents or things like that. But some families are not like that. You make very different decisions, and sometimes your family makes very different decisions from you. Sometimes, especially when you’re younger, you never really understand why your parents make certain decisions. You kind of start seeing when you gather more information about their background, the choices they’ve had to make previously that feed into the choices they make after. Then you begin to understand, okay, I see why they are making these choices. In Palace, it’s similar to that because you have the mom and dad who make very different choices from Lufeng herself. And she doesn’t understand why. Until much later, but even after she understands, she still has to decide, “Well, am I going to make the same choice? Or am I going to make a different choice? And if I do, what will happen to me and my family?”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, immigration and diaspora. It will always be something I explore, kind of like the push and pull of Eastern and Western cultures, always. Whenever I am in school, it’s completely filled with Western culture. That is what they teach you. Everything from the different events they host to the holidays they celebrate, and making the cards at school versus when I get home. It’s completely different because my parents would say, “You cannot speak English at home. You must always speak Chinese, or we will not respond to you.”
MR: Your main character hits a crossroads in this book where she has to make a vital decision for herself and her family. The buildup to this moment is quite powerful. What was the impetus behind this?
AJ: I forgot who said this quote, something like, “you are born dying.” The quote is only optimistic if you think about it optimistically. It’s like a cup, depending on how you see it, it’s half full or half empty. So if you are born dying, maybe you use your time more wisely because you have this kind of mentality, and you are able to find much more success or fulfillment. I feel a lot of the time I contemplate existentialism. Who are you living for? Why are you living? Why are we here? Why are you pursuing things, whether it’s material, whether it is more spiritual? Why do we have goals, and why do we need them to survive?
Why is it that some of us are very happy to just live contently? Whereas some other people are like, “No, I must do more with my life,” and it’s just fascinating to me. It’s like, why? Why do we always feel the need to do more, and why is it that some of us cannot find contentment in simply being in the life cycle?
MR: What are you working on next?
AJ: I’m currently working on my next horror novella/novel and intend for it to have some weird body horror elements. It seems like I’m always oscillating genres!
MR: Do you have any advice for new writers, or about writing careers more broadly?
AJ: I would say stay persistent, because this industry is definitely one that works towards a long-term accumulation rather than short-term reward—one where there may be long stretches between victories, which can be discouraging. Also, the longer I’m in publishing, the more I’ve realized just how subjective it is, and rather than trying to chase a trend or bend to a specific taste, it’s more worthwhile to develop our own style and voice. The last is something many have said and I think is so important to keep in mind: we only need one yes.
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