Ghost Forest, PikShuen Fung
Ghost Forest, PikShuen Fung
List: $12.50 | Sale: $8.75
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Ghost Forest

Author: Pik-Shuen Fung

Narrator: Pik-Shuen Fung

Unabridged: 3 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/13/2021

Synopsis

This “powerful” (BuzzFeed) award-winning 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.
 
“Quietly moving . . . connected by a kind of dream logic . . . deeply felt . . . There is joy and tenderness in . . . Fung’s elegant storytelling.”—The New York Times Book Review

How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings?

This is the question the unnamed protagonist of GhostForest 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 through 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 and heartbreaking, 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.

“Ghost Forest is the tender/funny book we can all appreciate after a hellish year.”—Literary Hub

Reviews

Goodreads review by s.penkevich on June 19, 2022

‘Did I ever get to know who he was becoming?’ Family is a difficult knot of people and emotions to untangle and comprehend, even more so when cultural differences enter the mix. Ghost Forest, the debut novel by Pik-Shuen Fung, seems gossamer thin told through sparse vignettes of the narrator and her......more

Goodreads review by Emily on September 28, 2022

A deeply intimate tribute to grief, love, sacrifice, and forgiveness. The power of this novel is that it truly delves into the essence of family; so often we do not truly know our parents, grandparents, guardians, until it is too late; we love, but it is so easy to take the little things, the unspok......more

Goodreads review by luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus) on May 27, 2022

❀ blog ❀ thestorygraph ❀ letterboxd ❀ tumblr ❀ ko-fi ❀ 2 ½ stars (rounded up as this is a debut) “Lik bat chung sam—do you know what it means? It means, what your heart wants but cannot do. It is an uncomfortable feeling. It’s the feeling of wanting to do something and not being able to.” Ghost Fore......more

Goodreads review by Thomas on September 15, 2023

Found this one a bit dry, unfortunately. In Ghost Forest Pik-Shuen Fung delves into some deep themes related to family, loss, and navigating grief. There were a few passages in the novel that touched me, like when the protagonist recognizes her previously one-dimensional view of her father and tries......more

Goodreads review by Jennifer on June 26, 2021

This book just appeared in front of me - I knew nothing about it, opened up the cover and I could not put it down. Lots of lessons packed in to this sparsely written novel - snippets of a family - regret, love, understanding and forgiveness - read in one sitting. So enjoyable and a full review to co......more

Quotes

“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

“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
 
“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, bestselling author of The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

“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. Inventive, funny, and devastating.”—Jennifer Tseng, award-winning author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
 
“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.”—K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary

“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
 
“Fung’s commitment to this multifaceted take on grief shines through in the moments of lightheartedness and joy that rub shoulders with the novel’s heavier themes.”—Ayoung Kim interviews Pik-Shuen Fung for Cold Tea Collective
 
“[A] moving debut . . . 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)

Awards

  • Amazon Canada First Novel Award
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