Imprint: Harvill Secker
Published: 04/02/2021
ISBN: 9781787301849
Length: 272 Pages
Dimensions: 241mm x 28mm x 162mm
Weight: 525g
RRP: £14.99
'This is a powerful novel that will sit inside you for days after reading.' Sunday Times
Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about one family's queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets.
One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman's body. Her name was Hu Gu Po and she paid the price for her body in hunger. It's one of many stories Daughter absorbs from the women in her family, about gourd daughters, buried gold and rabbit moons. Soon afterwards, Daughter wakes with a tiger tail.
And more mysterious events follow: holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her estranged grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with red hands and snakes in her belly; her brother tests the possibility of flight.
All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighbourhood girl who is more bird than tiger and has mysterious stories of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother's letters and the myths that surround them, Daughter must reckon with how deep these stories are buried within her, and what power is rising, violently, through her. She will have to bring her family's secrets to light in order to change their destiny.
'To read K-Ming Chang is to see the world in fresh, surreal technicolor... Both wild and lyrical, visionary and touching. Read her!' Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti
** LAMBDA LITERARY LESBIAN FICTION FINALIST**
Imprint: Harvill Secker
Published: 04/02/2021
ISBN: 9781787301849
Length: 272 Pages
Dimensions: 241mm x 28mm x 162mm
Weight: 525g
RRP: £14.99
A powerful novel that will sit inside you for days after reading
A visceral, magical tale - every sentence is worth savouring.
Full of magic realism that reaches down your throat, grabs hold of your guts and forces a slow reckoning with what it means to be a foreigner, a native, a mother, a daughter
Chang makes a spell rise from every wound, and I'm caught all the way up in this magic... one of the best emerging writers out there.
K-Ming Chang's prose ravishes, ravages, rampages. This is an absolute lightning strike of a debut. The world grew brighter as I read it.
Gorgeous and gorgeously grotesque . . . Every line of this sensuous, magical-realist marvel-about multiple generations of Taiwanese-American women in Arkansas whose lives are imbued with cultural and familial myth-is utterly alive.
The poet K-Ming Chang's debut novel, Bestiary, offers up a different kind of narrative, full of magic realism that reaches down your throat, grabs hold of your guts and forces a slow reckoning with what it means to be a foreigner, a native, a mother, a daughter - and all the things in between.
What gives me fuel are other books - anything stylish and/or dirty. This year I loved reading K-Ming Chang's Bestiary.
To read K-Ming Chang is to see the world in fresh, surreal technicolor. Hers is a dizzyingly imaginative, sharp-witted voice queering migration, adolescence, and questions of family and belonging in totally new and unexpected ways. Both wild and lyrical, visionary and touching. Read her!
Epic and intimate at once, Bestiary brings myth to visceral life, showing what becomes of women and girls who carry tigers, birds, and fish within. K-Ming Chang's talent exposes what is hidden inside us. She makes magic on the page.