Translated Fiction: Dorothy Tse for City Like Water

"To be ushered into Tse's hallucinatory city is a revelation, an unnerving gift." ~ CHINA MIEVILLE

Dorothy Tse is a writer from Hong Kong. Her debut novel, Owlish, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and her short story collection, Snow and Shadow, was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award.

A cofounder of the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres, she has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan's Unitas New Fiction Writers' Award.

Dorothy joins us for City Like Water, an extraordinary novel that has been met with much acclaim. As one journalist wrote: "dazzling imagery carries the narrative - and the city itself - far out to sea, as Kafka and Borges, old masters of the surreal and avuncular figures, look on approvingly from the shore."

The city you grew up in is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it - counterfeit watches, streets echoing with the sound of stilettos, and even some of your classmates and teachers. Then the disappearances come closer to home.

Your mother joins a housewives' protest over fake lotus roots only to be turned into a statue by the police. Your father is quietly absorbed into the enormous TV gifted by the government, reappearing in the background of soap operas.

And didn't you once have a little sister, before she flew away? As the police go undercover and transform your neighbourhood into a violent labyrinth you can no longer navigate, where does this leave you?

Lucid, nightmarish and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous tale of a city not so different from your own.

"Gritty and fragile at the same time, City Like Water addresses a central horror of our times: the overtaking of our cities and people by the powerful. It does so without surrendering to the tamed version of reality, but by renaming the fear and re-envisioning resistance. That is exactly what poetic lucidity is supposed to do."
~ YURI HERRERA