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.
‘Strung together via dream logic, this startling experimental novel from Tse forays into a bizarre Hong Kong vanishing around its inhabitants…. [A] rewarding exploration of change and loss.’
— Publishers Weekly
‘To be ushered into Tse’s hallucinatory city is a revelation, an unnerving gift.’
— China Miéville, author of Embassytown
‘In Bruce’s dizzy, delightful translation, Tse summons a world that magnifies and probes the seam between dark dream and heart-rending reality. Engaging and exhilaratingly inventive, encrusted with beguiling detail, City Like Water paints a metropolis like no other – and every other.’
— Polly Barton, author of What Am I, A Deer?
‘How to describe a city when its very existence is at odds with a dominant narrative? In City Like Water, Dorothy Tse conjures a corroded reality inhabited by strange (and estranged) citizens, seductive illogic and bizarre meals of haunted lotus roots and rice. With shimmering prose – gorgeously rendered by Natascha Bruce – Tse evokes the disquieting collision of revolt, nostalgia and desire’
— Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time
‘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
Praise for Owlish
‘Through the dark rearview of Tse’s fiction, Hong Kong’s past collides with its future.’
— Louisa Lim, New York Times Book Review
‘Owlish wittily captures a recent crisis moment in Hong Kong, exploring a discombobulating state caught between civilisation and its discontents.’
— Kit Fan, Guardian
‘In Owlish, nimbly translated by Natascha Bruce, there are several nods to Franz Kafka and Tse offers a powerful vision of government repression…. Tse combines the banal and the fantastic to terrific effect. Full of striking imagery, Owlish is a vertiginous tale of a people sleepwalking into catastrophe.’
— Lucy Popescu, Financial Times
‘Owlish is the story of a city as much as it is the story of Q. Between his correspondence with a strange figure known only as Owlish and a ballerina figurine who has come to life, the professor is immersed and distracted enough not to notice the city and his university emptying out around him as the political situation deteriorates and falls into chaos. Tse’s style in Owlish, with its magical elements, suggests a more overtly political Italo Calvino, or Salman Rushdie with a lighter touch … the story is engrossing and the prose, translated by the always satisfying Natascha Bruce, a delight.’
— Jessa Crispin, Telegraph
Dorothy Tse is a writer from Hong Kong. Her debut novel, Owlish, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and her short story collection, Snow and Shadow, was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. A cofounder of the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres, she has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award.
Dorothy Tse is a Hong Konger writer and the author of Owlish, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and Snow and Shadow, which was long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan's Unitas New Fiction Writers' Award. She is the cofounder of the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres.
Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese. Her recent work includes Owlish by Dorothy Tse, Mystery Train by Can Xue, and Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong. After several years in Hong Kong, she now lives in Amsterdam.
