Coldwire

At ten minutes to midnight, riot bots explode down a Button City avenue so a corporate capture unit can slip into a nightclub unseen. Within the hour, the soldier who was guarding the stairwell is on a viral video shooting the defence secretary, a killing she did not commit. That is how Coldwire by Chloe Gong begins, and it signals the big change in this author’s work: after the gangsters of 1920s Shanghai and the death games of her adult fantasy, Gong has moved into the near future, and the enemy is a company that owns the internet everyone lives inside.

Coldwire Plot Summary

The planet is choking, so most people have moved “upcountry”, into StrangeLoom, a virtual copy of the real world run by the mega-retailer NileCorp. Atahua and Medaluo, the two superpowers, are locked in a cold war, and orphans of Medan descent are raised as wards of the state and sent to military school. Eirale Ward, a contractor in the real world, is framed for an assassination and pulled into the crew of Nik Grant, the teenage bomber she was hunting. Lia Ward, a senator’s adopted daughter, is sent into virtual Medaluo for her final exam to find a missing engineer, paired with Kieren Murray, the rival she has tied with for first place since ninth grade. How the two stories fit together is the novel’s engine, and the less you know going in, the better it works.

Where Coldwire Sits in Chloe Gong’s Work

This is the first book of The StrangeLoom Trilogy, Gong’s debut in YA science fiction and her first series that is not built on a Shakespeare play. The reading order so far:

1. Coldwire (4 November 2025)
2. Deadlock (due 17 November 2026)
3. A third book, not yet titled

Book one appeared in 2025, so the sequel is close behind for anyone starting now.

What Coldwire Adds to Chloe Gong’s Range

Gong has always been good at a city. What she adds here is a world with two floors: a polished, rendered one where people work, shop and go to school, and a crumbling physical one where bodies lie in pods, servers hum and smog sits over half-empty high-rises. Each narrator mostly lives on a different floor, and the contrast does a lot of the thinking for the book. Coldwire by Chloe Gong is also her most openly political novel. A retailer that grew into the government’s private army, a news feed that rewards outrage, an orphan system designed to produce spies: the targets are familiar, but the satire stays light enough that the story never turns into a sermon.

What works

• The everyday detail. In virtual reality you still have to brush your teeth because the engineers coded morning breath, and a frozen display is fixed by running head first into a door. Small jokes like these make the world feel used rather than designed.
• Lia and Kieren. Two perfectionists who have shared first place for four years, needling each other through a hotel booking with one bed, a stolen motorbike and a delivery-driver disguise. The slow burn is earned and funny.
• Eirale’s deadpan. A soldier who answers every moral question with a shrug about paying the rent should be cold company. Instead her dry asides, and her slow thaw toward a crew she is supposed to betray, give the darker chapters their humour.
• The set pieces. A zip-line crossing of locked-down Threto, roof by roof, is the high point, with a near-fall that tests every relationship on the crew.
• Identity under suspicion. Medan faces are presumed to be spies in Atahua. Gong writes that pressure through both girls without lecturing, and it gives the cold war a personal edge.

Where It Gives Ground

• The length. At around 500 pages, Coldwire by Chloe Gong runs the same pattern too often: clone a credential, slip into a data centre, find a clue, flee. Six break-ins across two narrators blur together in the middle.
• First-person lectures. Both girls stop to explain history, economics and technology, sometimes for a full page, while the scene waits.
• Answers by conversation. The revelations arrive late and mostly in a single long talk, so the payoff is told more than shown.
• A middle-book ending. The finale of Coldwire by Chloe Gong changes the board and then stops. Readers wanting a complete arc should know book two is required.

Do You Need to Have Read Chloe Gong Before?

No. Coldwire by Chloe Gong shares nothing with the Secret Shanghai books or the Flesh and False Gods trilogy, so it is a clean starting point. Fans of her earlier work will still recognise the habits: alternating viewpoints, characters with secret loyalties, and a love story built on mutual irritation. Newcomers lose nothing.

Read These Next

If the corporate machinery of Coldwire by Chloe Gong is what kept you reading, try these.

1. Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman for an artificial intelligence that runs the world and the teenagers caught in its gaze.
2. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro for a quieter look at what makes a mind real.
3. Warcross by Marie Lu, the closest match for a virtual-world heist with a sharp Asian heroine.
4. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, if you want the escapist virtual reality that StrangeLoom is a darker answer to.

About Chloe Gong

Chloe Gong was born in Shanghai in 1998 and moved to Auckland, New Zealand, at the age of two. She began writing novels as a teenager on the notes app of an iPad.

• These Violent Delights (2020), a Romeo and Juliet story set in 1920s Shanghai, made the New York Times bestseller list when she was 21.
• Her adult fantasy trilogy began with Immortal Longings (2023) and continued with Vilest Things (2024).
• Forbes named her in its 30 Under 30 list in 2024.
• Coldwire became both a New York Times and a Sunday Times bestseller and was a Good Morning America young adult book club pick.

The Last Word

Coldwire by Chloe Gong is an ambitious, overstuffed first volume that gets more right than wrong. The world is vivid, the two heroines are distinct, and the Lia and Kieren chapters are some of the most enjoyable rival-romance writing in recent YA. A firmer edit would have cut a heist or two and let the truth come out in action rather than over a kettle. Teen readers who live half their lives on screens will find plenty to argue about here. Read it slowly, pay attention to small details, and keep book two within reach. Then log off and look at the sky, just to check it is still there.