The winner of a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, Owlish is a fantastically eerie debut novel that is also a bold exploration of life under oppressive regimes.

In a city called Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lackluster 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 has tantalizingly sprung 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 protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty.

The mountainous city of Nevers is itself a mercurial character with concrete flesh, glimmering new construction, and “colonial flair.” Having fled there as a child refugee, Q thought he knew the faces of the city and its people, but Nevers is alive with secrets and shape-shifting geographies.

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.

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NATASCHA BRUCE translates fiction from Chinese. Her work includes Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon, Bloodline by Patigül, NLake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong, and Mystery Train by Can Xue. Her translation of Dorothy Tse’s poem “Cloth Birds” was a winner of the 2019 Words Without Borders Poems in Translation Prize. After several years in Hong Kong, she now lives in Amsterdam.

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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.

Financial Times

Owlish moves past allegory and arrives at a place that is more profound.

Brooklyn Rail

fantastical yet utterly absurd … Tse’s novel is ultimately a discussion of British colonialism, oppression and censorship.

Stanford Daily

It is as though [Owlish], with its ellipses and obstructed messages, were depicting the reality-warping effects of an uncanny, constraining force—a force like state censorship.

New Yorker

Through the dark rearview mirror of Tse’s fiction, Hong Kong’s past collides with its future.

New York Times

A wonderfully imaginative fable that resonates with political critique and protest.

Kirkus

I was blown away by the craft, inventiveness, and humour of Owlish … A frustrated literature professor retreats into a secret inner world in this playful novel set in an alternate Hong Kong: a disquieting tale of revolt and rebellion, denial and self-delusion, and the tricks we perform to keep going in life … Owlish is both a sly subversion of fairytales and a Kafkaesque portrait of life under an oppressive regime.

Bookseller

With consummate skill, Tse builds a strange yet somehow familiar backdrop for her story.

Asian Review of Books

What’s most evocative about Owlish is its scrupulous recall of the city’s quirks … [Tse] wittily captures a recent crisis moment in Hong Kong, exploring a discombobulating state caught between civilisation and its discontents.

Guardian

Absorbing, erotic and at times nightmarish.

The Guardian