Ghost Town
A haunting tale of murder, secrets and superstitions
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE TAIWAN LITERATURE AWARD
"An uncompromising, unsentimental, slyly humorous novel." IRISH TIMES
"A haunting drama of a Taiwanese family's efforts to rise out of poverty." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Keith Chen, the desperately yearned for second son of a traditional Taiwanese family with five daughters, refuses to play the role his parochial parents would cast him in. Instead, he chooses to make a life for himself in cosmopolitan Berlin, where he finally finds acceptance as a young gay man.
The novel is set about a decade later, on Ghost Festival, the Day of Deliverance. After Keith's release from a maximum security prison, he has nowhere to go but home. With his parents gone, his siblings married, mad, on the lam, or dead, there is nothing left for him there, so it seems. As he explores his uncanny home town, we learn what tore his family apart, and, more importantly, the truth behind the terrible crime Keith committed in Germany.
Told in a myriad of voices—both living and dead—and moving through time with deceptive ease, Ghost Town is a mesmerizing story of family secrets, countryside superstitions, and the search for identity amid a clash of cultures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chen (Three Ways to Get Rid of Allergies) offers a haunting if overstuffed drama of a Taiwanese family's efforts to rise out of poverty. After Keith Chen arrives back in Yongjing, having spent a decade in prison in Germany for killing his lover, T, he reunites with his older sisters Beverly, Betty, and Belinda during the monthlong annual Ghost Festival, in which residents leave out offerings for the dead. Each sibling, as well as supporting characters, takes desperate measures to improve their lives. Beverly, the eldest, gets pregnant by the gambler Little Gao. Betty runs errands for the owners of the Tomorrow Bookstore before it gets shut down by the police for selling banned books. Belinda has an abusive husband and, in one poignant episode, visits Keith in prison. These strands, along with flashbacks of Keith's relationship with T in Berlin, have a sort of stuttered pacing, but Chen does a great job creating atmosphere. A hot bowl of soup "smell like a snake, silently slithering around your ankle, up your leg, around your waist," and termites "nibbl with fervid desperation." Eventually, Chen gets into the nightmarish details around T's killing, but it takes too long to bring everything together. Though vivid, this ambitious novel is a bit too unwieldy.
