In the mountainous city of 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 tantalizingly springs 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 sinister forces encroaching on his city and the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty. Thrumming with secrets and shape-shifting geographies, Dorothy Tse’s extraordinary debut novel is a boldly inventive exploration of life under repressive conditions.

Translator bio
Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese. Her work includes novels and story collections by Yeng Pway Ngon, Patigül, Ho Sok Fong and Can Xue. Her translation of Owlish by Dorothy Tse received a 2021 PEN/Heim grant. She lives in Amsterdam.

Author bio
Dorothy Tse is the author of several short story collections and has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award. Her first book to appear in English, Snow and Shadow (translated by Nicky Harman), was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. She is the co-founder of the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres.

‘A magical and potent tale for these tyrannical times.’
— NoViolet Bulawayo, author of Glory

‘Owlish is so delightfully creepy, wonderful and strange.’
— Camilla Grudova, author of Children of Paradise

‘A bold, brilliantly absorbing read. This clever, mercurial portrait of an alternate Hong Kong lingers long after the last page.’
— Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch

‘Beguilingly eerie, richly textured, the pages of Owlish are drenched in strange beauty and menace. Like all the best fairy tales, it reveals the dark truths that we would rather not look at directly, and does so with a surreal and singular clarity.’
— Sophie Mackintosh, author of Cursed Bread

‘Tse’s acerbic, freewheeling spirit is generically flirtatious, rather than genre-bound. She steals from the western canon with chutzpah and panache to create a subversive tale about perilous desire, high-rise bureaucracy and sophisticated corruption in a defenceless city under siege… .’
—Kit Fan, Guardian

‘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

‘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

‘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

‘In Owlish, Tse makes a compelling spectacle; demonstrating the price of apathy during oppressive administrations, suggesting how we might resist the unspeakable mechanisms of regime. She crafts a wondrous hinterland in her writing, imagining the waiting worlds we might dream ourselves into – if we try.’
— Annie Hayter, BIG ISSUE

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The translator has obtained permission from the original rights holder to translate this sample and share a recording of it on Translators Aloud.

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