'To thine own self be true'

Kiwi Chloe Gong became a New York Times bestselling young adult fiction star at 21. Two years on, she's plotting her transition to adult novels.

- SHERRY ZHANG

For an exciting and rapidly-paced coming-of-age story, it’s hard to beat the real-life exploits of New Zealander Chloe Gong, a bestselling young adult fiction writer now based in New York. Growing up on Auckland’s North Shore, Gong was determined to become a writer and had a plan to go early and go hard to make it happen. Not so many years ago, she was my schoolmate, a teenager entranced by Shakespeare’s plays in English classes at Rangitoto College and smashing out chapters for novels while waiting at the bus stop.

Now, the 23-year-old Chinese New Zealander has two New York Times bestselling young adult novels to her name: These Violent Delights and a sequel, Our Violent Ends. The novels, published in 2020 and 2021, are a bold re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – the clue is in the titles, which are from a quote in the play.

Set in 1920s Shanghai – the city of Gong’s birth – These Violent Delights is complete with silver-eyed monsters, a plague, and geopolitical tensions screeching to breaking point. The hero and heroine aren’t the gauche teens of Shakespeare’s tragedy but four years older; they’re jaded, estranged and heirs of rival gangs controlling the city.

Gong burst onto the international literary scene with this debut, driven by reviews from the venerable Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, which called it “incisive”, “arresting” and “a lush and wholly original debut”. These Violent Delights hit third place and stayed for 49 weeks on the New York Times’ young adult bestseller chart. Our Violent Ends followed by soaring to the top of the chart within a week of release.