Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Ghost Cities: 'As Beautiful as It Is Honest as It Is Funny' Guardian

Ghost Cities: 'As Beautiful as It Is Honest as It Is Funny' Guardian

Lu, Siang
Brockett, Keith

Audio Book

General FictionLiterary Fiction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1668178478
ISBN13: 9781668178478
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Published: Aug 13 2026
Language: English
An award-winning novel from an international rising star - spanning ancient and modern China - in the dazzlingly inventive style of Haruki Murakami and Kaliane Bradley

'Lu has a brilliant mind for style, language, pace and ideas, and this is a funny and fascinating book that I can't wait to read again and again.' Guardian

Inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China, Ghost Cities follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney's Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn't speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. The incident goes viral under the hashtag #BadChinese and attracts the attention of the eccentric film director Baby Bao, who uses Lu to attract press for his latest film. Bao's movie, based on ancient legends, is to be filmed in one of China's ghost cities.

How is his relocation to a ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed--then recreated, page by page and book by book--all in the name of love and art?

'Siang Lu layers myth and reality into a marvelous structure. This is bold, inventive storytelling, a novel full of ideas that never loses its heart.' Charles Yu, US National Book Award-winning author of Interior Chinatown

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