Siang Lu
Ghost Cities
UQP, 2024
Perfect for fans of Haruki Murakami, Ghost Cities is a profound and highly imaginative novel that cleverly draws on Chinese history to explore the absurdity of modern life and work.
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.
About the Author
Siang Lu is the author of Ghost Cities and The Whitewash, and the co-creator of The Beige Index. The Whitewash won the ABIA Audiobook of the Year in 2023 for its audio adaptation, which starred a large and diverse cast of fourteen actors. It also won the Glendower Award for an emerging writer at the Queensland Literary Awards and was shortlisted for a NSW Premier’s Literary Award. Siang holds a Master of Letters from the University of Sydney and has written for film and television for Singapore's Beach House Pictures and Malaysia's Astro network. He is based in Brisbane, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.