Ghost Forest cover art

Ghost Forest

A Novel

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Ghost Forest

By: Pik-Shuen Fung
Narrated by: Pik-Shuen Fung
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About this listen

 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

Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Magical Realism United States World Literature China Magic Funny Paranormal

Critic reviews

“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)
All stars
Most relevant
Pix-Shuen's voice reads her book beautifully, what I would call her memory bubbles . You don't need to be told in depth everything , it's refreshingly written with courage. I could visualise precious moments that really moved me, and felt her anxiety of not knowing what's expected of her at the hospital. it shows her families support of each other without the need to say they loved them dearly. Now going to read the book myself.

Beautiful & unique

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This is a truly beautiful book which I couldn’t recommend highly enough! The authors audio is a great listen.

Stunning

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This wonderful short memoir pierces your heart. This book is about trying to make sense of the world when one is compelled to live and bring up one's children in an alien culture torn away from that one person you love the most. It's about trying to find the silver lining in the face of a tragedy and about learning to bid a slow farewell. It's about picking up the many pieces and moving on as life continues oscillate between happiness and sadness. Between longing and indifference

Heartbreaking

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