Download book cover

Ghost Cities
by Siang Lu

Perfect for fans of Haruki Murakami, Ghost Cities is a profound and highly imaginative novel that cleverly draws on Chinese history to explore the absurdity of modern life and work.

A$32.99

(Trade paperback)

Available. Dispatched 2-3 business days

Overview

Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – 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.

How is his relocation to one such 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 re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art?

Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino.

Details

Awards

Reviews

Kate Mildenhall

‘Ghost Cities is a labyrinth of a novel that delights, terrifies, thrills and amuses in the very best of ways. An inventive and philosophical exploration of power, automation, art and love where nothing is as it seems; a decadent feast fashioned from tofu, a lush orchard carved from stone. Siang Lu’s brain at play is a thing of wonder.’

Hayley Scrivenor

‘What a pleasure to follow Siang Lu into his labyrinthine Ghost Cities! An instant Australian classic that stands both on the shoulders of giants and yet is somehow completely and delightfully new. Lashings of myth, absurdity, humour and pathos come together in this paean to art in all its forms. I want to crumple this novel into a ball and swallow it, whole.’

Nick Earls

‘Ghost Cities is a stunning piece of writing. It’s quite a feat to create one labyrinth in a book in a way that’s intricate and convincing, but somehow Siang Lu creates two that are, places them centuries apart and makes them act as mirrors to each other. I don’t know what would make an author even think that was possible, and yet here it is. Amazing. I hope it gets the recognition it deserves.’

Alice Pung

‘I love Ghost Cities. The inventiveness, the genius of it all – it is like the lovechild of Viet Thanh Nguyen crossed with Gabriel Garcia Marquez crossed with Kevin Kwan. It is nuts, and deep, and moving, and also funny.’

Siang Lu

Siang Lu is the author of Ghost Cities and The Whitewash, and the creator of Silly Bookstagram. The Whitewash won the ABIA Audiobook of the Year in 2023. Ghost Cities has been longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the ALS Gold Medal and has shortlisted for numerous literary awards, including The Age Book of the Year Award, the 2025 Russell Prize for Humour Writing, the VPLA John Clarke Humour Award, the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize and The University of Queensland Fiction Book Award and The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award at the Queensland Literary Awards.

In 2023 Siang was named one of the Top 40 Under 40 Asian-Australians at the Asian-Australian Leadership Awards.

He is based in Brisbane, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.