Fox Spirit On A Distant Cloud
Author(s): Lee Murray
Wellington, 1923, and a sixty-year-old woman hangs herself in a scullery; ten years later another woman 'falls' from the second floor of a Taranaki tobacconist; soon afterwards a young mother in Taumarunui slices the throat of her newborn with a cleaver. All are women of the Chinese diaspora, who came to Aotearoa for a new life and suffered isolation and prejudice in silence. Chinese Pakeha writer Lee Murray has taken the nine-tailed fox spirit huli jing as her narrator to inhabit the skulls of these women and others like them and tell their stories. 'Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud' is an audacious blend of biography, mythology, horror and poetry that transcends genre to illuminate lives in the shadowlands of our history.
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Chinese New Zealand author lifts the lid on hidden stories of the women of the Chinese diaspora in Aotearoa. Winner of the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize 2023.
Set within the recognisable beauty and savagery of New Zealand land-and-townscapes, inspired by tragic histories, Murray weaves together shapeshifting fox mythology and darkly compelling tales of Chinese diasporic women of Aotearoa. ‘You don’t belong here, you don’t belong here, you don’t belong…’ the atua whisper, and yet in Murray’s sumptuous prose, English, te reo and Chinese coalesce. Silenced voices – bloodied, broken – cry from the margins. Lest we forget.—Alison Wong
A skilful weaving of humanity and mythology, finely drawn portraits of lives in Aotearoa steeped in longing to both belong and return home.—Renee Liang
General Fields
- :
- : CUBA PRESS
- : CUBA
- : 01 March 2024
- : books
Special Fields
- : Lee Murray
- : Paperback
- : 136