Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with Dorothy Tse to discuss and celebrate the release of Owlish.

A professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina in a mordant and uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong

In a city called Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lackluster career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition: a music box ballerina named Aliss who has tantalizingly sprung to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty.

The mountainous city of Nevers is itself a mercurial character with concrete flesh, glimmering new construction, and “colonial flair.” Having fled there as a child refugee, Q thought he knew the faces of the city and its people, but Nevers is alive with secrets and shape-shifting geographies. The winner of a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, Owlish is a fantastically eerie debut novel that is also a bold exploration of life under oppressive regimes.

Translated by Natascha Bruce. Bruce's work includes novels and story collections by Yeng Pway Ngon, Patigül, Ho Sok Fong, and Can Xue. She lives in Amsterdam.

Dorothy Tse is a Hong Kong writer who has received the Hong Kong Book Prize and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award. She is the author of Snow and Shadow, translated by Nicky Harman, and cofounder of the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres.