Set in the tantalizingly detailed world of much of his other work, No Choice tells the story of a narrator from a landed and politically connected family with a history of losing scions in battle. At first, it isn’t a stalled and seemingly doomed war that concerns the main character, but the fact that his father has been sentenced to death for a murder he most definitely did commit. Political maneuvering and family dynamics come in to play, but to no avail, so off to the wars the narrator sails. There, he conceives a series of nested plans that may very well preserve the life of a man who deserves to die, win a war that nobody should be fighting, and maybe, just maybe, save his own skin in the bargain. Cover illustration by Vincent Chong