The Death God has never killed anyone. He collects souls after the fact, and he finds the teahouse stories about his fangs and claws faintly insulting. Then, one night at the gates of the underworld, the Heavens show him a vision: a gentle goddess picking peonies in a cottage above the sea, and the same goddess bleeding on the floor with his sword in her chest. To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang opens on that instruction from fate and spends the rest of the novel testing whether it can be refused. It is a smart engine for a romance, and the parts that run on it run very well.

How It Works

Rujia is a minor god of healing, the daughter of exiles, waiting in her cottage for a promotion that would finally make her name mean something. When Death arrives to carry out his orders, she notices what nobody else has: he is cursed and in constant pain. So she bargains. Give her one month and she will cure him.

That deal sets the rules. Rujia cannot kill him, cannot poison him and cannot outrun him, so every escape plan she tries is also a lesson in his limits. Her first remedy, a rare mountain flower, fails, because the curse lives in his memory rather than his body. To treat it she has to enter his past, and each session hands her another piece of the book’s real history: who cursed him, why, and what the golden Celestial Palace is hiding.

The second half shifts board. A disaster drops the Crown Prince into the Mortal Realm as a newborn, the blame lands on Rujia, and the Celestial Emperor gives her one chance. The prince must survive two prophesied trials as a mortal or his soul shatters for good. Because a day above equals a year below, the gods arrive to find him a grown man in Nanjing who has failed his examinations nine times. That is where To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang finds its best material.

What To Dream in Darkness Is Really Counting

Underneath the romance, To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang is a book about debts. Rujia knows that gods never give anything for free, and she reads every kindness from Death as a bill she has not yet seen. He reads her healing the same way. The cleverness is that both of them are right, and both are paying more than they admit.

The structure keeps that ledger visible. Part One alternates Rujia’s first-person present with chapters from other points of view, including a strand following the prince before his fall that steadily recolours everything Rujia believes about him. Part Two moves the pair into a shared, very small house, where they pose as a married couple and as tutors to their hopeless student. The switch from palace intrigue to domestic comedy is the best decision in the novel.

What works

• The bargain scenes. The early chapters in the Night Realm are tense and funny at once. Rujia’s attempts to escape fail in ways that teach the reader something each time, and Death’s dry outrage at mortal puppet shows about him is a running pleasure.
• The examination subplot. Liang clearly enjoyed researching the Ming civil service exams, from the cramped cells to the posted results. Watching a god of death mark a student’s eight-legged essay with total contempt is the funniest image in the book.
• The prince. Junyi is the surprise. His divine and mortal lives turn him from a plot device into the most affecting character on the page, and his chapters land harder than the central romance.
• A heroine with an ugly ambition. Rujia wants power and recognition, and the novel lets her want it without apology before asking what it costs.

Where It Gives Ground

• The prose never rests. Similes arrive two and three to a sentence, and recurring images (black eyes, rings, peonies, the will of the Heavens) are leaned on until they lose force.
• The angst repeats itself. Death’s self-loathing is restated chapter after chapter, and late on Rujia’s guilt gets the same treatment. Both characters understand themselves on the first statement; the reader does too.
• Uneven pacing. The tutoring stretch is pleasant but low in stakes for several chapters. Then the final third piles catastrophe on catastrophe so quickly that some of the largest events are summarised in a few lines.
• Rules that bend. Fate in To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang is absolute when the plot needs a wall and flexible when it needs a door, and the cosmic cost of defying it feels invented to order.

Read These Next

If the bargain and the Chinese myth drew you to To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang, start here.

1. A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang for Liang’s first adult novel, a tragic retelling of the legend of the beauty Xishi.
2. The Poet Empress by Shen Tao for a palace-intrigue fantasy in an imperial Chinese setting where poetry is a form of magic.
3. Immortal Longings by Chloe Gong for a body-swapping death game and a romance between rivals with knives out. Liang names Gong as an influence.
4. Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan, for a celestial court drawn from Chinese legend and a heroine fighting her way into it.
5. Mortal Things by Marie Lu, another new romance in which Death is the brooding party, this time in modern London.

About Ann Liang’s Second Adult Novel

Born in Beijing in 2000, Ann Liang published her first novel at twenty-two and has since become one of the busiest names in young adult romance. This is her second novel for adults, and it plainly shares a sensibility with her first.

• Her debut, If You Could See the Sun (2022), won the Readings Prize for Young Adult fiction and was optioned for television.
• Her YA backlist includes I Could Give You the Moon by Ann Liang, a spin-off of her debut published in April 2026.
• A Song to Drown Rivers (2024) was a Good Morning America Book Club pick.
• To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang is out now from St. Martin’s Press, released on 27 October 2026, with the UK edition from Tor on 29 October. St. Martin’s offered a bonus novella, To Dance at Dawn, to readers who preordered.

What Stays With You

The clever bargain gets the book started, but what lasts is the shed in Nanjing: two immortals arguing over potatoes, essay drafts and who sleeps on the floor, while a failed scholar tries to believe someone is on his side. Read past the purple patches and To Dream in Darkness by Ann Liang has a generous, sad heart, even if it buries it under more simile than it needs.

Death was told to collect one soul on time. The novel is the story of everything he does instead.