Tuesday 1 December
6:30-9pm
Please join us to celebrate City Like Water by Dorothy Tse, translated by Natascha Bruce. Dorothy Tse is a writer from Hong Kong and the author of Owlish, City Like Water and the short story collection Snow and Shadow. Natascha Bruce is a translator from Chinese. Her translation of Owlish was a finalist for the NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize.
'City Like Water is an unclassifiable, sharp, ingenious, passionate novel in which the city that is dissolving is also one’s only home.'
— Madeleine Thein, Guardian
'To be ushered into Tse's hallucinatory city is a revelation, an unnerving gift.'
— China Mieville, author of The Rouse
The city you grew up in is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it – counterfeit watches, streets echoing with the sound of stilettos, and even some of your classmates and teachers. Then the disappearances come closer to home.
Your mother joins a housewives' protest over fake lotus roots only to be turned into a statue by the police. Your father is quietly absorbed into the enormous TV gifted by the government, reappearing in the background of soap operas. And didn't you once have a little sister, before she flew away? As the police go undercover and transform your neighbourhood into a violent labyrinth you can no longer navigate, where does this leave you?
Lucid, nightmarish and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous tale of a city not so different from your own.
'Gritty and fragile at the same time, City Like Water addresses a central horror of our times: the overtaking of our cities and people by the powerful. It does so without surrendering to the tamed version of reality, but by renaming the fear and re-envisioning resistance. That is exactly what poetic lucidity is supposed to do.'
— Yuri Herrera, author of Season of the Swamp