Jeannette Ng Books in Order

If you want her signature gothic fantasy: Under the Pendulum Sun
If you like eerie fairy lore and Victorian theology: Under the Pendulum Sun
If you want the clearest place to begin: Under the Pendulum Sun

Jeannette Ng was born in Hong Kong and now lives in Durham, England. She studied at Durham University, where she earned an MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. That mix of academic history and everyday life shows up all through her work: old texts, odd beliefs, and people who keep walking into places that do not make sense.

Old theology and old stories turned out to be a pretty direct route to fantasy.

Ng has said that her interest in medieval and missionary theology helped shape her love of gothic fantasy. While she was at university, she stumbled across Victorian missionary manuals in the library while avoiding an essay. That chance bit of reading became the seed for Under the Pendulum Sun, her first novel and still the book most readers know her for.

Published in 2017, Under the Pendulum Sun is set in an alternate nineteenth century where British missionaries travel to Arcadia, land of the fae. Its heroine, Catherine Helstone, crosses into that world to look for her missing brother Laon, and what follows is part haunted-house novel, part fairy tale, and part argument about faith. Readers who click with Ng often like that combination of eerie atmosphere, religious questions, and fairy lore that feels old, dangerous, and never cute.

It is not a cozy visit to fairyland.

Her shorter fiction shows the same habit of taking an unusual idea and pushing it somewhere stranger. Three Hundred Years, about a mermaid who is also an anchorite, and Goddess with a Human Heart, about a human sacrifice in a cyberpunk post-apocalypse, are good examples. So are How the Tree of Wishes Gained its Carapace of Plastic and We Regret to Inform You, which move between folklore, horror, and academic weirdness without losing their human core.

Ng's career has also been shaped by the conversations around speculative fiction, not just the stories themselves. Under the Pendulum Sun won the Sydney J Bounds Award for Best Newcomer at the British Fantasy Awards, and in 2019 she won the award then called the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her Worldcon acceptance speech sparked a broader debate about who the field chooses to honor. The speech itself later won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Related Work.

Off the page, she has a practical, handmade streak that suits her fiction. She has said she used to sell costumes out of her garage, and she still runs live roleplay games. She also writes essays and commentary, and that broader work helps explain why her fiction feels so interested in performance, clothing, ritual, and the stories institutions tell about themselves.

There is a lot of curiosity in Ng's work, but not much interest in neat answers. She likes borderlands, places where myth meets doctrine, or history meets invention, or desire meets fear. She still lives in Durham, and her writing keeps returning to those uneasy meeting points.