A Mouthful of Dust
core novella 2025 The Singing Hills Cycle
Record
| First published | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novella |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.17 (3,863 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781250386403 |
| Internal chronology | 6 |
Synopsis
A Mouthful of Dust, sixth novella in Nghi Vo's Singing Hills Cycle, follows cleric Chih and their memory-bird companion, Almost Brilliant, as they continue their travels collecting stories for the archives of Singing Hills Abbey. Their journey brings them to a town still marked by a famine it endured in the not-too-distant past, and Chih sets about gathering the accounts of townspeople who lived through the hardship. As residents share their recollections, unsettling and seemingly supernatural undertones surface alongside the town's ordinary grief and resilience, giving the historical record Chih is compiling an uneasy edge. Moving between individual testimonies, the novella builds a picture of how a community remembers a period of scarcity and loss, and how such memories linger in a place long after the immediate crisis has passed.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Singing Hills Cycle
- Series: The Singing Hills Cycle core; position 6 of 7 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Nghi Vo
Notes
- From the series record (The Singing Hills Cycle): Ongoing connected-novella cycle following the wandering cleric Chih and their hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant, collecting oral histories across the world of Anh. A seventh entry, A Long and Speaking Silence, has been announced but not yet published as of this record.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Singing Hills Cycle: position 6 of 7: previous The Brides of High Hill (2024) · next A Long and Speaking Silence (2026)
- Internal chronology, within The Singing Hills Cycle: position 6 of 6: previous The Brides of High Hill (2024)
Sources
- The Hugo Awards: 2021 Hugo Awards
- https://cannonballread.com/2026/01/a-mouthful-of-dust-the-singing-hills-cycle-6-beereadsbooks/
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