Books by Jeremy Tiang (translator)
“The novel spans half a century. We start with meeting the two detectives in 2013, and then you go backwards in time (as far as 1967) to meet their younger selves and see how what happened in the past informed what happened in the future. The novel encompasses a number of classic detective stories that play with the conventions of the genre: there’s a starlet falling from a bridge to her death, a kidnapping, rival gangs, the 1967 riots against the colonial government…It’s a page-turner. It’s a thick book—a block, basically—but I couldn’t put it down. It draws you in with all its twists and turns, and its powerful sense of momentum. The Borrowed has won major awards in Japan and Taiwan and been translated into over a dozen languages. And of course, you know a book’s made it when Wong Kar-wai buys the movie rights.” Read more...
Wong Yi, Novelist
The Wedding Party
by Liu Xinwu and Jeremy Tiang (translator)
***Winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize***
The Wedding Party is a novel by Liu Xinwu which was published in 1984, not many years after the beginning of China's reform and opening up under Deng Xiaoping and less than a decade after the end of the Cultural Revolution. The setting is a courtyard house in Beijing, near the Bell and Drum Towers (which is the Chinese title of the book). The action all takes place in one day, with a large cast of characters, as one of the families living in the courtyard holds a wedding. Even though the novel has no grand plot holding it together, as a snapshot of an era in China's history and some people's experience of it, it's very evocative. It's also quite funny, with some very memorable characters.
Interviews where books by Jeremy Tiang (translator) were recommended
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1
Mourning a Breast
Xi Xi and Jennifer Feeley (translator) -
2
The Drunkard
Liu Yichang, Charlotte Chun-lam Yiu (translator) -
3
Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City
Dung Kai-cheung and Anders Hansson & Bonnie S. McDougall (translators) -
4
The Borrowed
by Chan Ho-Kei & Jeremy Tiang (translator) -
5
The Kite Family
Hon Lai-chu and Andrea Lingenfelter (translator)
The Best Hong Kong Novels, recommended by Wong Yi
The Best Hong Kong Novels, recommended by Wong Yi
Hong Kong’s fiction scene punches above its weight, and it’s not all political allusion. From magical realism to detective fiction, award-winning writer Wong Yi recommends her five favourite novels from a city depicted in fictional form as simultaneously claustrophobic and cosmopolitan.
