Synopses & Reviews
A professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina in a mordant and uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong
With your face covered, sneaking into a city you thought you knew, are you still yourself? Or have you crossed to another world, where the streets are unpredictable and the people strangers, where you might at any moment run into some unknown dream version of yourself?
In a city called Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lackluster 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 has tantalizingly sprung 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 protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty.
The mountainous city of Nevers is itself a mercurial character with concrete flesh, glimmering new construction, and "colonial flair." Having fled there as a child refugee, Q thought he knew the faces of the city and its people, but Nevers is alive with secrets and shape-shifting geographies. The winner of a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, Owlish is a fantastically eerie debut novel that is also a bold exploration of life under oppressive regimes.
Review
"Late capitalist malaise and political turmoil populate Nevers, the glittering, neoliberal city at the heart of Dorothy Tse's debut novel, Owlish....Natascha Bruce was awarded a PEN/HEIM grant for her sparkling translation of this richly imagined, modern-day fairy tale." — Center for the Art of Translation
Review
"Tse's vision is entirely original and wonderfully bizarre. The language of Natascha Bruce's elegant translation surprises and delights at every turn." — Andrew Ervin, The Brooklyn Rail
Review
"A wonderfully imaginative fable that resonates with political critique and protest." — Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Dorothy Tse is a fiction writer who has received multiple literary awards in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Her collection Snow and Shadow (translated by Nicky Harman) was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. A co-founder of Hong Kong's leading literary magazine, Fleurs des Lettres, she teaches at Hong Kong Baptist University.