**A professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina in a mordant and
uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong
**
With your face covered, sneaking into a city you thought you knew, are
you still yourself? Or have you crossed to another world, where the
streets are unpredictable and the people strangers, where you might at
any moment run into some unknown dream version of yourself?
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. 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.
