This is yet another book that I would personally recommend to people, but not one that I can say I actually liked. It has so much content that it brings a whole community and, by extension, another country to the reader's mind.
I chose to read this book because we made a short visit to Taiwan before we left HK. It was a very hurried thing. I tagged along for a conference and extended things by a couple of days. If we had known we would be moving away from the area, I might have put more thought into the visit. We traversed a part of the country by train, and it differed greatly over the stretch we covered. The people were very friendly and even without a common language we found them extremely helpful. We had to hunker down during a typhoon as well, so that definitely cemented the trip in my memory. I mention all this because, throughout my reading of this book, I could feel the collective variety of the people introduced to us. There is nothing remote about this book. It is brutally honest at most times.
The narrative moves backwards and forwards time, and it is only towards the end that we have a complete picture of a family.
The family had multiple daughters but only two sons. The community of the time and the opportunities dictated to them defined how all of them were treated. None of them is truly happy by the time the book concludes, and I did not see much hope for any resolution of feelings - this might be the personal reason I did not enjoy the book.
Each sister is not introduced by her name. We earn her name after learning of her situation and the work she puts in on a daily basis. One brother is completely missing from the plot, leaving one.
We know enough about multiple generations and the aspirations they had for the community that stagnated after a point.
I cannot talk of any particular plot point because many of them wrap around and surprise the reader. It is a very clever book that manages to hold something back after every reveal, keeping it hidden until one assumes they know everything there is to know.
It is the kind of book I would genuinely recommend to friends of mine who want to try a different story based on a whole other culture.
I have learnt over the years to take some of the sadder narratives in my stride, but after witnessing multiple iterations of issues that the family has, I wanted closure. I kept waiting for any small happiness that could be someone's future but saw none forthcoming. This left me annoyed. I know I cannot expect to feel at ease with a story like this, but I hoped for more. This is probably why I recommend the book, even though I did not like it. It is an intelligent narrative that employs the style to ensure interest in the overall direction of the plot.
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

I put this novel “on hold” about eight months ago, and I’m still not entirely sure if I will continue. I hope I will because, in one way, it was very intriguing. In another way, it dragged, and I wasn’t sure anymore if I liked it. If I will continue, I will update my review. For now, I will not post this review anywhere else. Thank you for the ARC and this opportunity!

Amazing!

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me read this book in exchange for my review.

Keith Chen, the desperately yearned for second son of a traditional Taiwanese family with five daughters, refuses to play the role his parochial parents would cast him in. Instead, he chooses to make a life for himself in cosmopolitan Berlin, where he finally finds acceptance as a young gay man.

The novel is set about a decade later, on Ghost Festival, the Day of Deliverance. After Keith’s release from a maximum security prison, he has nowhere to go but home. With his parents gone, his siblings married, mad, on the lam, or dead, there is nothing left for him there, so it seems. As he explores his uncanny home town, we learn what tore his family apart, and, more importantly, the truth behind the terrible crime Keith committed in Germany.

I really enjoyed this highly original family epic, largely set in Yongjing in Taiwan. It's the first novel I've ever read by a Taiwanese author, and it was fascinating to learn about small-town life in the countryside and the Ghost Festival, which is cleverly used to explore the key theme of ghosts (whether ghosts/secrets from the past or characters leading ghost-like existences in the present). The starting point - Keith Chen's return home from Berlin following his release from prison and the mystery surrounding his crime - leads into an exploration of his entire family history, and traces the highly complex lives of his parents and siblings. Plenty of secrets are excavated by the end of the novel, which is told from a myriad of perspectives, including the dead. Key themes include: family, survival, gay identity, female empowerment & disempowerment, poverty & wealth, friendship. Hats off to translator Darryl Sterk, who does a wonderful job of conveying the nuances of Taiwanese culture and the significance of certain sayings or terms (e.g. the name Yongjing means eternal (yong) peace (jing)). Genre-defying and highly recommended.

There aren't too many novels set in Taiwan that have been published in / translated into English, so when I saw it was the setting for Kevin Chen's new novel I jumped at the chance to read it.

Ghost Town (the original title literally translates as "Ghost Place", however the translator gives an interesting epilogue explaining the justification behind some of his translation choices -- not all of which I agreed with but that's by the by) tells the story of a family from rural central Taiwan, an oppressive, dead-end sort of place where everybody knows each other and nothing ever happens.

Keith - a young gay man and the youngest of seven children - longs to escape, and travels to Berlin where he begins to build a new life. We meet Keith as he is leaving a German prison, where he has been serving a sentence for killing his partner. The author then introduces us to Keith's parents and siblings, and it is through their backstories that we find out what led Keith to this point.

All of the characters are haunted by ghosts (either literally or figuratively) from their past and present, hence the title. The siblings all long to escape Yongjing, but for different reasons find themselves inextricably linked to (and drawn back to) their hometown.

This is a strongly character-led novel which I'd also describe as a contemporary family saga. It's also a slow burn, and I felt like I was constant teetering between feeling engrossed in the story and by desperately wanting something to happen, and feeling like the narrative needed to move along. Certain plot points took forever to be revealed, to the extent that when the big reveal came I had already lost interest.

The story is quite often incredibly bleak, with every character having a dispiriting backstory: most (if not all) of the cast have experienced some kind of abuse - be it emotional, physical or sexual.

There were some positives: despite my misgivings this is an accomplished novel which largely held my interest. Taiwan as a character itself felt very well evoked, and some of the prose had me longing to be back on its humid, palm-lined streets. I'll be sure to check out any other translated novels by this author in the future.

Ghost Town recounts our main protagonist, Keith’s experiences upon returning to his village of Yongjing in Taiwan after he is released from prison in Germany. We know from the outset that Keith has killed his husband but the circumstances are left shrouded in mystery at the beginning of the novel. If you expect this to be the focal point of the novel, you’ll quickly be proven wrong for we are given so much more: through rotating perspectives of Kevin’s family members (Kevin is the second son and also has five older sisters) details of their own lives, their messy familial relationships and their secrets from one another are uncovered and Chen does this at a pace that left me hooked to read on!

I really enjoyed the multiple perspectives that we got in this novel. However, since four of the sisters all have very similar names starting with a ‘B’ at times I felt that staying with one perspective for a bit longer would have made it much easier for the reader to keep track! A LOT is revealed in this novel and towards the last 3/4 of the novel it is somewhat hard to keep up with the unravelling of secrets based in Yongjing.

Regarding the T plot line and perhaps this is just indicative of my own knowledge of Germany having lived there but the ‘18’ clue was very obvious. Perhaps intrigue for other readers will still be high there but, for me, from that point it was very clear to see where the main plot line and point of intrigue was heading.

Still, this was a very enjoyable read and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in literature from Taiwan!
Thank you to NetGalley and Europa Editions for the eARC!

Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town won the Grand Prize at Taiwan’s Literature Awards. It’s a fractured family saga centred on a writer Keith who grew up in a large family based in the small, rundown town of Yongjing in rural Taiwan. From an early age Keith knew he was gay, bullied and isolated he fled to Berlin where his troubled relationship with street performer T led to murder and Keith’s imprisonment. The story opens after Keith has been released and has returned to Taiwan just in time for the annual Ghost Festival when the Gate of Hell is said to open and the spirits of the past rise up. His return reunites his scattered siblings, all struggling, some with money, some tormented or self-harming, another the victim of domestic violence. All of them haunted by the ghosts of their past and their traumatic childhood.

Chen’s novel builds on his own experiences, and his flight to Berlin in search of a space in which his identity wouldn’t mark him out as other. His multi-voiced narrative takes in aspects of Taiwan’s history particularly during the years of repressive, authoritarian leadership, as well as drawing extensively on its rural customs and legends – hanging dead cats from trees to stop their spirits from returning, ghosts who lurk in the corners of the town, strange apparitions who herald doom. I was fascinated by the glimpses of Taiwan’s cultural history, and the richly-detailed references to ghost stories and myths, which mirror the myths of Keith’s family and its own buried spectres.

Chen’s clearly interested in examining the workings of memory and the impact of generational trauma here but I found his story so aggressively, viscerally downbeat that it became almost numbing. Chen takes in rape, murder, suicide, casual cruelty and outbursts of violence, brutal incidents that follow one after another throughout. I also found the shifts between characters a bit dizzying at times, although the structure is clearly intended to be episodic, so that the underlying meaning slowly builds chapter by chapter. So, for me, an interesting book but not an enjoyable or particularly successful one. Translated by Darryl Sterk

DNF - I was so eager to read this book & the first 20% was of great interest to me. I felt that the construction of the world where the story takes place was authentic in detail & perfectly explained to the reader. However, I soon began to lose steam & found the later parts to be rather dull -- the story dragged a lot & this is possibly entirely subjective as the reviews have been boasting high ratings since its original publication. That being said, there were a few points of view that I wanted to read about & then the others felt like a repetition of the same things without a dedicated voice to distinguish them from each other. Cliff (the patriarch) spoke in an identical way to Keith & perhaps that is a stylistic choice but because there was no indication of timeline or to whose point of view we would be switching, I stalled in my reading flow because I was constantly trying to piece together information that had been given to us multiple chapters prior.
The story within this book is of great interest to me but, the way in which it was presented was not my cup of tea.

Unfortunately this book was not for me and I did not finish it. The language felt a bit stilted and I didn’t feel intrigued, even by the mention of murder unfortunately. I think that others I know would enjoy it more than me as it still was an intriguing premise, even if I personally did not feel it met my expectations

This story tells the tale of the Chen family; a Tiwanese family full of ghosts. Our story starts with Keith Chen returning to his childhood home on the day of the Ghost Festival after killing his partner in Germany. Keith swore he would never return to Yongjing...why is he back? Hells’ gates are opened, and the Chen family secrets are ours to hear.

When we first begin reading, it feels like we have jumped into a Chen family dinner, blind, with zero background knowledge regarding the family’s history. As the story unfolds, so do the family’s secrets and we begin to find our answers to the many questions the beginning of the story presents. Who is red shorts? What are White House crackers? Who is T? What has happened to this family and the individuals who are unfortunately a part of it?

This is quite literally one of the most fabulous stories I have ever read. Deep, thought provoking, and painful; Kevin Chen is a literary genius.

In the grand scheme of things, this story is just about a small town family full of deep rooted trauma and unhealed wounds, and I believe many readers can relate themselves to the characters in some way. More than that though, we see growth and pain and suffering and love...This book has absolutely everything that explains life itself.

This novel will stick with me for a lifetime. I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone.

Ghost Town weaves between different family voices, each chapter revealing more and more family secrets.

I enjoyed the concept of ghosts in the novel, and found the authors note afterwards interesting and insightful.

It was great getting to be immersed in Taiwan again, but having just finished another Taiwanese LGBT novel, I couldn’t help but compare the two and enjoyed the other, albeit different in tone and genre, that little bit more, so I had to give Ghost Town a 3 star.

I didn’t particularly enjoy the translators decision to give the characters English names and the translators note didn’t change my opinion on this. I think it’s important in translated texts to not change everything to appeal to English speakers. The food in the novel wasn’t translated into an easy to understand English version, and I believe that’s exactly the way it should be!

Overall, I had mixed feelings about the novel. At times, I felt it was too slow, and put me into a bit of a slump, but I found the descriptions to be great and enjoyed learning more about Taiwan. I enjoyed the different voices and getting to know the different characters and “ghosts”. I thought I’d be more interested in the storyline surrounding T but enjoyed the mystery of it rather than the reveal.

Ghost Town follows the Chens, skipping around between time frames and narrators to paint a complex and deeply intricate portrait of a family plagued by loss, globalization, and secrets. The catalyst for the story is the return of the youngest son, Keith, a gay man who returns to Taiwan during its Ghost Festival after spending years in German prison for killing his domestic partner.

The author pushes the limits of what we think of as “ghosts”. Are they things of the past? Are they other people? Or are they the memories that follow us and haunt us continuously?