Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with author Dorothy Tse to discuss and honor the release of City Like Water. She will be in conversation with writer Kelly Link.

RSVP here.

The city you grew up in is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it―classmates, teachers, counterfeit watches, the erotic toe cleavage that used to lead the way down secret passages. Yet you still catch snatches of conversation lingering in the air and glimpse sun-dazzled residents retreating into dark crevices.

People seem to keep disappearing. Your mother joins in a housewives’ protest, each woman waving the fake, bloody lotus roots they were sold until police helicopters unleash a glittery spray that turns them into statues. Then it’s just you and your father at home, until he is quietly absorbed into the enormous new TV gifted by the government, and you spot him doing tai chi or picking through leftovers in the background of soap operas. And didn’t you once have a little sister, before she flew away in her school uniform? As the police go undercover and transform your neighborhood into a violent labyrinth you can no longer navigate, where does this leave you?

Lucid, nightmarish, and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous and pointed message in a bottle from a city not so different from your own. Translated by Natascha Bruce whose recent work includes Owlish, also by Dorothy Tse, Mystery Train by Can Xue, and Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong.

Dorothy Tse is a writer from Hong Kong. Her debut novel, Owlish, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and her short story collection, Snow and Shadow, was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. A cofounder of the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres, she has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award.

Moderator Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, Get in Trouble, and White Cat, Black Dog and the novel The Book of Love. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a MacArthur Fellowship. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and the owner of Book Moon, an independent bookshop in Easthampton, MA.