A professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina in a mordant and uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong.
With your face covered, sneaking into a city you thought you knew, are you still yourself? Or have you crossed to another world, where the streets are unpredictable and the people strangers, where you might at any moment run into some unknown dream version of yourself?
In a city called Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre 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 tantalisingly 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.
'Tse joins the ranks of artists currently remaking the world, from Yoko Tawada to Cesar Aira.'
-Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne
'By turns playful and melancholy, Dorothy Tse's tales never fail to mesmerise. They are wonderfully assured, and genuinely strange.'
-Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Likes
'Dorothy Tse is a magnificent historian of unreal places. Her sage and serious characters are cast adrift in realities that are neither sage nor serious at all - and possibly impossible. Her parallel worlds and paradoxes brilliantly illuminate our own reality, with all its fictions masquerading as facts (and vice versa). Boundlessly creative, richly philosophical - I loved this book.'
-Joanna Kavenna, author of Zed
