'A cruel Emperor. An innocent brother, exiled to the sixth level of hell. A beautiful woman, imprisoned in a labyrinth beneath the palace. These are the players in a tale in which a series of ever-more-ingenious escapes are hatched; a chess-playing automaton is forged; an assassination or three attempted; and where every single book in the known Empire is destroyed - then re-created, page by page and book by book - all in the name of love and art.
'Meanwhile, in modern-day Australia: Xiang, a young Chinese-Australian man, is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate when HR discovers he doesn’t even speak a word of Chinese, and has been relying on Google Translate to do all his work. A doctor’s diagnosis reveals that he suffers from Taikophobia (fear of Chinese people) and, later, Anglophobia (fear of Westerners). Despite these impediments, he soon finds himself in China, in one of the country’s infamous ‘ghost cities’, those modern-day labyrinths built by the Chinese government to maintain an aggressive GDP. The once-empty ghost city of Port Man Tou has now been turned into a gigantic film set ...' (Publication summary)
'From the first page, Ghost Cities is a novel built on shifting ground. The portentous introduction of Imperial heir Lu Huang Du as a youth who knows himself to be ‘Exceptional’ is immediately undercut by the decidedly unexceptional image of him ‘gawping’ as his ‘purple-faced’ father chokes to death on a chicken bone. Five pages later, in the next chapter, we find ourselves riding the bus with luckless anti-hero Xiang Lu, who has just lost his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate because it’s been discovered that he doesn’t actually speak Mandarin.' (Introduction)
'A playful and metafictional novel about storytelling, Chinese history and contemporary society.'
'This novel is both biting satire and love story, unfolding in a surprising melange of wonder and intelligence'
'Siang Lu’s polyphonic début novel, The Whitewash (2022), occupied a unique place in Australian fiction. It was written as an oral history, with a cast of voices, sometimes in conflict with one another, coalescing to tell the story of the rise and fall of a Hollywood spy blockbuster. The film was supposed to star the first-ever Asian male lead in such a role, but he was replaced by a white actor at the last minute. Blending real and invented film history, The Whitewash was an original work of satire, providing a breath of fresh air in the local literary landscape – even more so considering that it dealt so adroitly with matters of race and representation, normally approached in a much more conventional, and predictable, way.' (Introduction)
'Siang Lu’s polyphonic début novel, The Whitewash (2022), occupied a unique place in Australian fiction. It was written as an oral history, with a cast of voices, sometimes in conflict with one another, coalescing to tell the story of the rise and fall of a Hollywood spy blockbuster. The film was supposed to star the first-ever Asian male lead in such a role, but he was replaced by a white actor at the last minute. Blending real and invented film history, The Whitewash was an original work of satire, providing a breath of fresh air in the local literary landscape – even more so considering that it dealt so adroitly with matters of race and representation, normally approached in a much more conventional, and predictable, way.' (Introduction)
'This novel is both biting satire and love story, unfolding in a surprising melange of wonder and intelligence'
'A playful and metafictional novel about storytelling, Chinese history and contemporary society.'
'From the first page, Ghost Cities is a novel built on shifting ground. The portentous introduction of Imperial heir Lu Huang Du as a youth who knows himself to be ‘Exceptional’ is immediately undercut by the decidedly unexceptional image of him ‘gawping’ as his ‘purple-faced’ father chokes to death on a chicken bone. Five pages later, in the next chapter, we find ourselves riding the bus with luckless anti-hero Xiang Lu, who has just lost his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate because it’s been discovered that he doesn’t actually speak Mandarin.' (Introduction)
