Ghost Cities
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney' s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn' t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed – then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art? Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A crackpot film director hires a fraudulent translator to work on an epic of imperial China in this clever sophomore novel from Lu (The Whitewash). When the Chinese consulate in Sydney discovers their employee of six months, Xiang Lu, can't actually speak or read Chinese, and that he's been relying on Google for his translation work, they fire him. The story goes viral, and he catches the attention of eccentric filmmaker Baby Bao, who's planning to shoot a 27-hour movie in the fictional Chinese ghost city of Port Man Tou. Hoping to drum up publicity, he hires Xiang as his translator, unconcerned about Xiang's poor language skills, and Xiang joins him in Port Man Tou, which Bao has populated with actors and converted into a set. Their story alternates with that of the subject of Bao's film: paranoid Emperor Lu Huang Du, who ascends the throne after his father chokes on a chicken bone. Among his many impulsive acts as ruler, he bans chickens across the empire and appoints an infant as the Imperial Taster. The author cannily holds up the emperor's story as a mirror to the actions of egotistical Bao, exploring themes of deception, unchecked power, and objective truth with great humor. Readers will find plenty to feast on.
