Ghost Cities

Description

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 recreated, 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.

Reviews

STAFF REVIEW

The Imperial food taster is dead and, as is the law, the job is passed down to the first born son—in this instance, a 3-month old baby. And so the search for a taster to the taster to the Emperor begins. This is the opening chapter of, what I consider to be, the funniest book I've read this year. A parallel narrative also follows a modern day Chinese translator who's fired as he's unable to speak a word of Chinese (he just put everything into Google Translate). But when it's predicted that the Emperor will die a thousand deaths and the translator is hired by a megalomaniac film director, the question of what (and who) is real begins to take a stronghold over both stories. Chaotic, insane, hilarious. I loved, loved, loved it.

—Jordan from Brunswick Street Bookstore