AustLit

'A cruel Emperor. An innocent brother, exiled to the sixth level of hell. A beautiful woman, imprisoned in a labyrinth beneath the palace. These are the players in a tale in which a series of ever-more-ingenious escapes are hatched; a chess-playing automaton is forged; an assassination or three attempted; and where every single book in the known Empire is destroyed - then re-created, page by page and book by book - all in the name of love and art.

'Meanwhile, in modern-day Australia: Xiang, a young Chinese-Australian man, is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate when HR discovers he doesn’t even speak a word of Chinese, and has been relying on Google Translate to do all his work. A doctor’s diagnosis reveals that he suffers from Taikophobia (fear of Chinese people) and, later, Anglophobia (fear of Westerners). Despite these impediments, he soon finds himself in China, in one of the country’s infamous ‘ghost cities’, those modern-day labyrinths built by the Chinese government to maintain an aggressive GDP. The once-empty ghost city of Port Man Tou has now been turned into a gigantic film set ...' (Publication summary)