This won the Miles Franklin in 2025 – I think a lot of book sellers were caught on the hop, I couldn’t find a copy anywhere and ended up buying a digital version.
Here’s the blurb …
Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed – then recreated, page by page and book by book – all in the name of love and art?
Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino.
I really enjoyed this – it was funny, intriguing, absurd, and thought provoking.