First published 2026
Qianze receives a phone call that changes everything. Her father waits on her childhood home's porch after eleven years of silence. He vanished when she turned fourteen without any word. The frail man before her looks nothing like the father she remembers. Something dark fills his eyes now. He carries a prophecy he must tell her. Ba begins sharing stories from his past as a Red Guard during China's Cultural Revolution. He tells her about his mother's pain under Japanese occupation in Manchuria. As he speaks, Qianze starts seeing visions. Fox spirits track her from work to home. A terrifying jackalope creature enters her dreams. Each story Ba tells makes the prophecy more pressing. Qianze always wanted to know her family's history. These revelations shock her more than she expected. Yang connects folklore with family stories across three generations. She shows how colonial trauma moves from parents to children. The past keeps breaking through to the present.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, magical-realism, asian-american, family-drama, chinese-literature
Vibes: atmospheric, emotionally-complex, haunting, introspective, lyrical
Tropes: family-reunion, generational-storytelling, supernatural-manifestation, unreliable-reality
Setting: China, Manchuria, Beijing
Period: Cultural Revolution, Japanese Occupation
368 pages · Paperback · Dead Ink Books
Content warnings: colonialism, war