Owlish

I was blown away by the craft, inventiveness, and humour of Owlish … A frustrated literature professor retreats into a secret inner world in this playful novel set in an alternate Hong Kong: a disquieting tale of revolt and rebellion, denial and self-delusion, and the tricks we perform to keep going in life … Owlish is both a sly subversion of fairytales and a Kafkaesque portrait of life under an oppressive regime.

Bookseller

What’s most evocative about Owlish is its scrupulous recall of the city’s quirks … [Tse] wittily captures a recent crisis moment in Hong Kong, exploring a discombobulating state caught between civilisation and its discontents.

Guardian

fantastical yet utterly absurd … Tse’s novel is ultimately a discussion of British colonialism, oppression and censorship.

Stanford Daily

Tse combines the banal and the fantastic to terrific effect. Full of striking imagery, Owlish is a vertiginous tale of a people sleepwalking into catastrophe.

Financial Times

A wonderfully imaginative fable that resonates with political critique and protest.

Kirkus

With consummate skill, Tse builds a strange yet somehow familiar backdrop for her story.

Asian Review of Books

Through the dark rearview mirror of Tse’s fiction, Hong Kong’s past collides with its future.

New York Times

It is as though [Owlish], with its ellipses and obstructed messages, were depicting the reality-warping effects of an uncanny, constraining force—a force like state censorship.

New Yorker

Owlish moves past allegory and arrives at a place that is more profound.

Brooklyn Rail