Fiction
GHOST TOWN
by Kevin Chen
Description
A Taiwanese take on TWIN PEAKS, or SHARP OBJECTS meets Flannery O’Connor in Garcia Marquez’s Macondo. A prodigal son returns to investigate a death in the family in this bestselling literary mystery.
Yongjing, a small town in central Taiwan and whose name means “Eternal Peace”, is anything but. It is the birthplace of Keith Chen – youngest of seven siblings and result of parents who desperately wanted a son but instead got only daughters. He turned out to be gay; of course, he had to run away.
The story begins many years later, when Keith has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend in Berlin. He is about to return to Yongjing, now a poor and desolate place. With his parents gone, sisters married (to wrong guys), mad, or dead, there is really nothing left for him here. So why is he coming back? What happened more than a decade ago that tore this happy family apart? And why did Keith kill his German boyfriend?
Told in a myriad of voices – both living and dead – and moving through time with deceptive ease, GHOST TOWN weaves a mesmerizing web of family secrets and countryside superstitions, the search for identity and clash of cultures.
More Information
Rights Information
World English: Europa Editions
Korean: Minumsa
Vietnamese: Nha Nam
Marketing Information
Winner of the Taiwan Literature Award
Winner of the Golden Tripod Award
Nominated for the Openbook Award
Nominated for the Taipei Book Fair Award
Official “Books from Taiwan” Selection
Reviews
“Kevin Chen’s latest novel GHOST TOWN is a masterpiece of twenty-first century Taiwanese 'native soil' literature that shows how international the most remote rural backwater is and how worldly Taiwanese literature is. It’s quite an achievement.” --Chen Kuo-wei, United Daily News (Taiwan)
“Kevin Chen's semi-autobiographical novel draws blood in its poignant depiction of the painful process of growing up.” -- Openbook (Taiwan)
“In his essays and stories, Kevin Chen has always dealt with the anxiety of identity and the complexity of belonging as he tries to loosen some of the knots tied in us by experiences of prejudice and bullying and by conflicts between family and individual, self and society, and freedom and authority. -- Liberty Times (Taiwan)
“You don’t have to live in Yongjing to understand Kevin Chen's GHOST TOWN because everyone’s hometown is a shameful ghost town.” -- Chiang Ya-ni, OKAPI (Taiwan)
“As a ghost town, Yongjing is a temporal microcosm of Taiwan. However mundane daily life in Yongjing may seem, the haunting figure of the ghost is a reminder of the absurdities of its history.” -- The News Lens (Taiwan)
“The so-called ‘ghost’ is a symbol of the monstrousness of modern incarnations of what the Buddhists call sentient beings – we modern sentient beings can, according to Kevin Chen's novel GHOST TOWN, be regarded as amalgams of the trauma in our families and the terror and callousness of our contemporary moment.” -- Sin Chew Daily (Malaysia)
Author Biography
陳思宏 Kevin Chen (b.1976) began his artistic career as a cinema actor, starring in various Taiwanese and German films. Now based in Berlin, he is a staff writer for Performing Arts Reviews magazine. He has published several books of essays and fiction.
The Grayhawk Agency
Founded in 2008 by Gray Tan, we are a leading literary agency in Asia, representing over 200 foreign publishers and agents in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. We also represent a select list of Asian authors in film/tv and translation, whose works have been licensed in over 30 countries and to production companies in Asia, Europe, and Hollywood.
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher Mirror Fiction
- Publication Date December 2019
- Orginal LanguageChinese complex
- ISBN/Identifier 9789869837330
- Publication Country or regionTaiwan
- FormatPaperback
- Primary Price 380 TWD
- Pages344
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusPublished
- Original Language Title鬼地方
- Original Language Authors陳思宏
- Copyright Year2019
- Dimensions21 x 15 cm
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