City Like Water Signed Bookplate Edition

‘City Like Water is a synecdoche for wider realms of social and political unrest. But by the end of its nineteen chapters, the novella devolves into a twisted tale of mutilated memories and shifting realities in a post-protest, increasingly authoritarian city…. In the face of structural censorship, all that remains is the remembrance of things past…. Tse knows that memory is ever-rippling, uncapturable, and more inclined to the minor, passive tremors of everyday life than the major events that mark the act of narration.’
— Michelle Chan Schmidt, Words Without Borders

‘City Like Water is playful, and it is sinister. Tse blends these moods and twists inside a surreal, hypnotic cityscape, accented by ferocious bursts that will describe – for example – the thud of a falling body using the image of a meteor that bores through the narrator’s skull, turns it to coral, and crushes her at the bottom of a black ocean. Tse’s piece, short enough to call a novella, is experimental without pause. But its maze of impressionistic anxiety, sensory overload, and random reality shifts are not purely aesthetic. The maze and its terrors are means for insight into a place in time where place and time – and the will to live, the why to live – are becoming unmoored.’
— Angus Stewart, Asian Review of Books

‘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

‘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?

‘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

‘Through the dark rearview of Tse’s fiction, Hong Kong’s past collides with its future.’
—  Louisa Lim, New York Times Book Review (praise for Owlish)

‘Owlish wittily captures a recent crisis moment in Hong Kong, exploring a discombobulating state caught between civilisation and its discontents.’
— Kit Fan, Guardian (praise for Owlish)

‘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 (praise for Owlish)

‘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 (praise for Owlish)