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**BESTSELLING WINNER OF THE TAIWAN LITERATURE AWARD**
Keith Chen, the desperately yearned for second son of a traditional Taiwanese family with five daughters, refuses to play the role his parochial parents would cast him in. Instead, he chooses to make a life for himself in cosmopolitan Berlin, where he finally finds acceptance as a young gay man.
The novel is set about a decade later, on Ghost Festival, the Day of Deliverance. After Keith’s release from a maximum security prison, he has nowhere to go but home. With his parents gone, his siblings married, mad, on the lam, or dead, there is nothing left for him there, so it seems. As he explores his uncanny home town, we learn what tore his family apart, and, more importantly, the truth behind the terrible crime Keith committed in Germany.
Told in a myriad of voices—both living and dead—and moving through time with deceptive ease, Ghost Town is a mesmerizing story of family secrets, countryside superstitions, and the search for identity amid a clash of cultures.
Author: Kevin Chen
Paperback Published 1 November 2022 384 pages
Read and Recommended by Hendri:
"This superb novel from Taiwan follows Keith Chen, a gay protagonist, who revisits his hometown Yongjing, after being released from a prison in Berlin. As he has nowhere to go, his return to the snow village coincides with the Ghost Festival or the Day of Deliverance. While it first seems that there is nothing left for him there, he meets his childhood friend and secret crush, Sam, who soon leads him to confront the deeply-buried secrets of his family, which tore them apart. When Keith was outed as gay, he escaped to Berlin only to be trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with a man named T, whose family also couldn’t accept their relationship. Struggling to make the ends meet, Keith and T are pushed to their limits with no point of return. Keith’s struggles in the foreign land are masterfully interwoven with the stories of his sisters, mother, and the ghost of his father lingering in the hometown. All of them attempt to figure out the terrible crime Keith has committed, while facing the hard truth about jealousy and competition that eventually lead some of them to death and insanity. This is not an easy to read novel. Though rife with bleak and grim scenes, it also simultaneously shimmers with beautiful sentences and metaphors—more than just a gay novel, Ghost Town is a novel about the haunted town with its past that never lasts, and also about forgiveness."