Owlish

Q is a professor of literature in Nevers, a mountainous city that he first reached as a child refugee. His marriage is dull and his career has stalled, but he keeps a private pleasure locked in a cupboard: a collection of antique dolls. His latest and most prized acquisition is a music box ballerina named Aliss, who unexpectedly comes to life.

Urged on by his enigmatic friend Owlish, and drawn by a painting that seems strangely familiar, Q throws himself into an obsessive love affair with Aliss. Meanwhile protests are spreading through the university, and his lecture halls are almost empty, though he hardly notices. Nevers itself plays an active part in the story. With its colonial touches, shiny new buildings and shifting layout, the city keeps revealing secrets to a man who believed he knew its faces. The novel asks what happens to a person's identity when they move through a familiar place in disguise and might meet a dreamlike double of themselves at any turn.

Owlish is a darkly comic, eerie fable of contemporary Hong Kong and Dorothy Tse's debut novel. It looks at life under oppressive regimes and received a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant.