A Perfect Day to Put Your Head in the Oven

Multiple award-winning international literary debut novel of what happens when a writer gives up on fiction to explore the truth of her own youth, for fans of Kawakami, Ferrante and Lucia Berlin

The only difference between fiction and memoir is Truth . . .

What if you wrote your memoir – and everyone in it told you that you remembered your life wrong?

AN AWARD-WINNING TAIWANESE LITERARY SENSATION

Translated by Lin King, translator of International Booker Prize-winning TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE

‘A gorgeous, surprising and deeply intelligent book. I read it rapt and awestruck’ CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS

Funny and startlingly original novel for readers of Lucia Berlin, Elena Ferrante and Mieko Kawakami, about a writer who gives up on fiction – only to discover how unreliable the truth can be.

Faced with writer’s block, Tan abandons her first novel and decides to write a memoir instead.

As she revisits her youth, she begins comparing memories with old friends. Was it really a dinner-table game that revealed her parents were on the brink of divorce? Was her aunt’s shower curtain actually made from raincoats? And if everyone remembers the past differently, whose version can she trust?

Then something stranger happens. Tan’s memoir begins to acquire a life of its own, gradually replacing the past with something new.

What emerges from the metaphorical oven is no longer a faithful record, but a freshly baked creation made from memory, imagination and desire.

Tender and genre-defying, A PERFECT DAY TO PUT YOUR HEAD IN THE OVEN asks what happens when the stories we tell about our lives become more powerful than the truth.
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READER LOVE FOR A PERFECT DAY TO PUT YOUR HEAD IN THE OVEN

***** ‘Reading this made me fly back to my own past’

***** ‘I enjoyed its tenderness. Like the protagonist at the end, I felt warmth float into my eyes’

***** ‘Interesting and philosophical. This cleverly considers the differences between fiction and reality’

***** ‘A book to read over and over’

***** ‘Not only a process of “memory reconstruction”, but a dialectic of “fiction vs. reality”’

***** ‘Its words are like a whirlpool, pulling me back to my teenage years’