Ghost Forest
Winner of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award
Winner of the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
Published by One World (US) and Strange Light (Canada)
International translations: Il Saggiatore (Italy), Düşbaz (Turkey), and Editions XYZ (Quebec).
Recommended by The New York Times, Oprah Daily, TIME, Buzzfeed, Travel & Leisure, Vancouver Sun, Chicago Review of Books, Boston Globe, Ms. Magazine, Refinery29, LitHub, The Observer, Poets & Writers, The Millions, HelloGiggles, Bustle, The Book Slut, Debutiful, Paperback Paris, Book Riot, and more.
about the book
This “powerful” (Buzzfeed) debut about love, grief, and family welcomes you into its pages and invites you to linger, staying with you long after you’ve closed its covers.
How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings?
This is the question the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong “astronaut” fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China.
As she revisits memories of her father throughout the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs.
Buoyant, heartbreaking, and unexpectedly funny, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese Canadian astronaut family.
praise For ghost forest
“Connected by a kind of dream logic . . . Ghost Forest is at times melancholy, but never regretful; deeply felt, but unencumbered. There is joy and tenderness in what’s missed, and Fung’s elegant storytelling accomplishes a lot with deceptively little.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Slim, delicate . . . Fung’s prose is its own calligraphy—blank spaces balanced against terse vignettes, evoking the wisdom of the Cantonese proverb ‘Trees want to be still, but the wind won’t stop blowing.’” –Oprah Daily
“At the center of this intricately plotted debut is a daughter with questions about her father after his death. Her search, both complex and devastating, yields revelations about family, grief, and the durability of love.” –TIME
“This kaleidoscopic debut from a beguiling new voice in fiction is a uniquely structured meditation on loss. Layering in poetic detail, trenchant humor, and familial history with the subtle touch of a painter, Pik-Shuen Fung’s striking use of white space in her prose gives a tactile weight to her character’s grief, transforming what’s often a private experience into a profoundly communal one.” –Chicago Review of Books
“Compelling and mesmerizing . . . Ghost Forest evokes such deep feelings in the spaces between the narration, echoing the space (and time) between her and her father and her heritage . . . Fung writes with grace, melancholy, and humor . . . a remarkably poignant novel.”–The Book Slut
“This is the book I’m excited about. . . . It’s about grief but it’s . . . light as a feather, and it has to do with how it’s arranged on the page. It’s almost like reading poetry but it’s a novel. . . . The words are beautiful, the writing is gorgeous, but just the way the book is laid out feels extremely refreshing.”—Ann Patchett
“Composed of vignettes—some of which span generations, some of which made me laugh out loud, many of which gave me Very Strong Feels—Ghost Forest is the tender/funny book we can all appreciate after a hellish year.” –Literary Hub
“Ghost Forest is an exceptional debut—risky, precise, witty and beautiful. How can a painting be distilled into ‘a single line,’ or love take root without a home to ground it? Fung creates an almost transparent yet weighted world made of relations. This is a moving, alive and unforgettable book.”—Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
“In Ghost Forest, Pik-Shuen Fung gives us a family so aching with tenderness, so incandescent with grief and love, that reading about them felt like reading about my own deepest and most secret longings and regrets. This is a book to break your heart and then fill it to bursting again. What an exquisite, glorious debut.”—Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse
“‘With a single line, you can paint the ocean,’ says an art teacher in Ghost Forest, as apt a description as any for Pik-Shuen Fung’s spare, gorgeous, devastating debut novel. Here, silences speak. Brilliant and pitiless at first, Ghost Forest mutates in the reader’s hand, until it shimmers with grace and unexpected humor. A mercurial meditation on love and family.”—Padma Viswanathan, author of The Ever After of Ashwin Rao
“Like a Chinese ink painting, every line in Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest is full of movement and spirit, revealing the resilient threads of matrilineal history and the inheritance of stories and silences. With humor, compassion, and clear-eyed prose, Fung reminds us that grief, memory, and history are never linear but always alive. Fung writes about the questions we forget to ask, the stories that are hidden from us, and the complex acts of care at the core of family. She reminds us that what is unspoken is never lost. Ghost Forest is an intimate act of recording and reckoning. It trusts us to listen. It shows us all the languages for love.” —K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary
“Made by an artist who angles her mirror to make room for the faces of others, Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest resembles a xieyi painting, a place where white space and absence are as important as color and life. At once an elegy to all that’s been lost between countries, languages, generations, and a quietly urgent call to love what we have. Inventive, funny, and devastating.” —Jennifer Tseng, author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
“Ghost Forest is a debut certain to turn your heart. With a dexterity and style all her own, Pik-Shuen Fung renders the many voices that make up a family, as well as the mythologies we create for those we know, and those we wish we knew better. I am madly in love with this book, a kaleidoscopic wonder.”—T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
"Moving… bracing fragments and poignant vignettes come together to make a stunning and evocative whole.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Seemingly spare yet undeniably dense with so much unsaid, Fung’s polyphonic first novel is a magnificent literary triumph.”—Booklist (starred review)