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Ghost Town

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Ghost Town

By: Kevin Chen, Darryl Sterk - translator
Narrated by: Nicky Endres
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About this listen

A NEW YORK TIMES MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF FALL 2022

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND WINNER OF THE TAIWAN LITERATURE AWARD

Keith Chen, the second son of a traditional Taiwanese family of seven, runs away from the oppression of his village to Berlin in the hope of finding acceptance as a young gay man.

The novel begins a decade later, when Chen has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. He is about to return to his family's village, a poor and desolate place. With his parents gone, his sisters married, mad, or dead, there is nothing left for him there. As the story unfurls, we learn what tore this family apart and, more importantly, the truth behind the murder of Chen's boyfriend.

Told in a myriad of voices, both living and dead, and moving through time with deceptive ease, Ghost Town weaves a mesmerizing web of family secrets and countryside superstitions, the search for identity and clash of cultures.

"Multidimensional characters, a beautifully realized setting, and an apposite surprise ending . . . This book is excellent."—Booklist (Starred Review)

©2019 Kevin Chen; Translation copyright 2020 by Darryl Sterk (P)2024 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books Crime Fiction Literature & Fiction World Literature Fiction Exciting Suspense
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Wins the prize for the most tiresome narrator of the year. The translation choices did not work for me at all (all the Taiwanese characters got renamed with a rather bizarre array of English names — the result felt like an early-nineties’ soap opera roster). The novel itself just tried too hard to be dark and shocking in some very obvious ways. An important story? No doubt. Well-intentioned? Yes. A good read? Nope.

Sadly, not impressed

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