The Lantern Bearer

In the water towns of Jiangnan, when someone dies, you have to ask someone to light a soul-guiding lamp and keep it burning for forty-nine days. It must never go out. If the lamp won’t light, or the flame turns black or blue, or the wick mushrooms, then the dead have something to say and a debt to collect. Gu Qingdeng fled home to escape his debts and took over the “lantern tending” trade his grandfather left behind. He reads the lamps, and he reads people. He collects debts for the dead and clears debts for the living. But he himself owes a life to the underworld. Every debt he clears shortens his own wick by a little. Every lamp holds a story about the human heart. The most terrifying thing in this world has never been ghosts, but people who are even better at keeping accounts than ghosts.