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Ghost Forest
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Pik-Shuen Fung
- Length: 3 hrs and 47 mins
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Ghost Forest
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Publisher's Summary
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 finished hearing the last word.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RAKUTEN KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE • “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
What the critics say
"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)
“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, and generations, and a quietly urgent call to love what we have. Inventive, funny, and devastating.” (Jennifer Tseng, award-winning 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)
What listeners say about Ghost Forest
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- R. Baldry
- 2023-01-05
Small and perfectly formed
Creating a novel in so few words is a tremendous skill. Instead of spreading out character development, story, emotion and narrative across pages and pages of text, it requires all those things to be layered into every sentence. Like the ink calligraphy artworks that feature so significantly, the spaces and shapes of the prose tell their own part of the story, allowing our minds to truly engage with characters and the scenes depicted.
Reviews of the novel in its print form question how much of the story is autobiographical rather than fictional, and having the author narrate her own work only deepens that confusion. But regardless of the true answer it also strengthens that experience for the listener.
Aside from its exploration of grief and loss, it also shines a fascinating light on the sense of displacement felt by migrants and provides a beautiful insight into how the cultures of Hong Kong and China deal with those feelings.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- misstodd
- 2021-07-24
Beautiful and hearbreaking
A vivid heartbreaking story with a soft and quiet tone that is so impactful where few words is more. The story is about the author's reflection on she and her family learning to love and grief. The experience of an era where many Hong Kong families were separated due to immigration in the 90's. The struggle with emotions and relationships in Chinese traditions. Brilliant and completely captivating! I could not put it down!!!
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Karen W. Lam
- 2022-06-17
Elegant, Simple and Utterly Perfect
I lost my father eight years ago and I live in Vancouver, BC Canada. My family is originally from Hong Kong, and this book feels like it could have been a more beautiful narration of my own life. I laughed, I commiserated. I cried. How could I not recommend it? Well done.
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1 person found this helpful