Owlish

A professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina in a mordant and uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong.

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 tantalisingly 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.

Owlish is the literary equivalent of a house of mirrors, refracting and distorting shards of Hong Kong's recent past ... A wildly inventive read. - Louisa Lim, The New York Times Book Review

Owlish ... has been translated into a playful and sinuous English by Natascha Bruce ... the book, with its ellipses and obstructed messages, were depicting the reality-warping effects of an uncanny, constraining force—a force like state censorship. - Katy Waldman, New Yorker

Though Ms Tse alludes to a number of artistic influences ... her writing most resembles that of Kazuo Ishiguro in its ability to render a strange allegorical fantasia in precise, formal prose. (The excellent translation from the Chinese is by Natascha Bruce.) But Owlish is sexier than Mr Ishiguro's books, in rich and discomfiting ways—a "folk tale", as Q imagines his reckless romance, "full of lust and passion". - Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal