Ghost Forest

(Paperback)

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This"powerful" (BuzzFeed) award-winning debut about love, grief, and family welcomes you into its pages and invites you to linger, staying with you long after you've closed its covers. "Quietly moving . . . connected by a kind of dream logic . . . deeply felt . . . There is joy and tenderness in . . . Fung's elegant storytelling."-The New York Times Book Review How do you grieve, if your family doesn't talk about feelings This is the question the unnamed protagonist of GhostForest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong "astronaut" fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China. As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs. Buoyant and heartbreaking, GhostForest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family. "GhostForest is the tender/funny book we can all appreciate after a hellish year."-Literary Hub

Reviews

This isthe book Im excitedabout. . . . Its about grief but its . . . light as a feather,and it has to do with how its arranged on the page. Its almost like reading poetry but its a novel. . . . The words arebeautiful, the writing isgorgeous, but just the way the book is laid out feelsextremely refreshing.Ann Patchett

GhostForest isa debut certain to turn your heart.With a dexterity and style all her own, Pik-Shuen Fung renders the many voices that make up a family, as well as the mythologies we create for those we know, and those we wish we knew better.I am madly in love with this book,a kaleidoscopic wonder.T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

Here, silences speak. Brilliant and pitiless at first, GhostForest mutates in the readers hand, untilit shimmers with grace and unexpected humor.A mercurial meditation on love and family.Padma Viswanathan, bestselling author of The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

Made by an artist who angles her mirror to make room for the faces of others, Pik-Shuen Fungs GhostForest resembles a xieyi painting, a place where white space and absence are as important as color and life. Inventive, funny, and devastating.Jennifer Tseng, award-winning author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

Like a Chinese ink painting,every line in Pik-Shuen Fungs GhostForest is full of movement and spirit,revealing the resilient threads of matrilineal history and the inheritance of stories and silences.With humor, compassion, and clear-eyed prose, Fung reminds us that grief, memory, and history are never linear but always alive.K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary

This is a book to break your heart and then fill it to bursting again. Whatan exquisite, glorious debut.Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse

Fungs commitment to thismultifaceted take on grief shinesthrough in themoments of lightheartedness and joy that rub shoulders with the novels heavier themes.Ayoung Kim interviews Pik-Shuen Fung for Cold Tea Collective

[A] moving debut . . . Bracing fragments and poignant vignettes come together to make a stunning and evocative whole.Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Seemingly spare yet undeniably dense with so much unsaid, Fungs polyphonic first novel is a magnificent literary triumph.Booklist (starred review)

Author Bio

Pik-Shuen Fung was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Vancouver, Canada. She has received fellowships and residencies from Kundiman, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Millay Arts, and Storyknife. Ghost Forest, her first book, won the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction.