Cirrus@Austlit

'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)