"In Bruce's dizzy, delightful translation, Tse summons a world that magnifies and probes the seam between dark dream and heart-rending reality." --Polly Barton "How to describe a city when its very existence is at odds with a dominant narrative? In City Like Water , Dorothy Tse suggests the status of corroded reality with strange (and estranged) citizens, seductive illogic, and bizarre meals of haunted lotus roots and rice. In shimmering prose--gorgeously rendered by Natascha Bruce--Tse evokes the disquieting collision of revolt, nostalgia, and desire." --Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time "Gritty and fragile at the same time, City Like Water addresses a central horror of our times: the overtaking of our cities and people by the powerful. It does so without surrendering to the tamed version of reality, but by renaming the fear and reenvisioning resistance. That is exactly what poetic lucidity is supposed to do." --Yuri Herrera, author of Season of the Swamp "To be ushered into Tse's hallucinatory city is a revelation, an unnerving gift." --China Miéville, author of The Book of Elsewhere "A rewarding exploration of change and loss.

" --Publishers Weekly "Now is a good time for a City Like Water ." --Angus Stewart, Asian Review of Books "Herein lies the answer to how one writes about and makes sense of a city where free speech is being curtailed, and where overtly political statements can be seen as conspiring to subvert state power. Tse's surrealism is an act of imaginative defiance, a tactical reframing of reality itself, and a way of speaking the unspeakable when direct articulation is no longer safe." --Sharon Chau, Oxford Review of Books.