Owlish
Translated by Natascha Bruce
Overview
A professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina in a mordant and uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong.
In the mountainous city of Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition: a music box ballerina named Aliss who tantalisingly springs to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the sinister forces encroaching on his city and the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty.
Thrumming with secrets and shape-shifting geographies, Dorothy Tse’s extraordinary debut novel is a boldly inventive exploration of life under repressive conditions.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Paperback
- 210mm x 135mm
- 224 pages
- 9781922585738
- AUD$27.99
- 2 May 2023
- ANZ
- Asia Literary Agency
Categories
Awards
- Longlisted for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle's Barrios Book in Translation Prize
Praise
‘[Owlish] is the literary equivalent of a house of mirrors, refracting and distorting shards of Hong Kong’s recent past … A wildly inventive read.’
‘Owlish … has been translated into a playful and sinuous English by Natascha Bruce … the book, with its ellipses and obstructed messages, were depicting the reality-warping effects of an uncanny, constraining force — a force like state censorship.’
About the Author
Dorothy Tse is one of Hong Kong’s most celebrated and award-winning writers whose stories have been widely published in English. She is the author of four short-story collections in Chinese, including So Black (2003, 2005) and Ghost in the Umbrella (2020), and has garnered attention in English since the 2014 publication of her collection Snow and Shadow (translated by Nicky Harman; longlisted for 2015 Best Translated Book Award).
Dorothy has been granted residencies at Art Omi, The Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing, University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and Vermont Studio Center and with translator Natascha Bruce, Tse was a winner of the 2019 Words Without Borders Poems in Translation Prize. She currently lives in Hong Kong, where she teaches creative writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Owlish is her first novel.
Translator
Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese. Her work includes novels and story collections by Yeng Pway Ngon, Patigül, Ho Sok Fong, and Can Xue. Her translation of Owlish by Dorothy Tse received a 2021 PEN/Heim grant. She lives in Amsterdam.
