Hardback: Nga-Yee, a librarian, lives a quiet life with her fifteen-year-old sister Siu-Man. After a difficult, impoverished upbringing and the deaths of their parents, they are finally finding a bit of stability.
Then one day, Nga-Yee comes home to find her teenage sister has jumped to her death from their twenty-second floor window.
Was it suicide, or was she pushed?
And does it have anything to do with a recent trip on the Hong Kong subway which left Siu-Man silent and withdrawn?
Nga-Yee cannot rest until she knows the truth about her sister - even if that means tracking down her sister's friends one by one and making them confess.
Part detective novel, part revenge thriller, Second Sister (2020, English translation) explores themes of sexual harassment, internet bullying and teenage suicide - and vividly captures the zeitgeist of Hong Kong today.
Second Sister is translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang.
About the author: Chan Ho-Kei lives in Hong Kong. He has won the Mystery Writers of Taiwan Award for his short stories, and in 2011 he won the Soji Shimada, the biggest mystery award in the Chinese world.
About the translator: Jeremy Tiang's novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. He has translated more than ten books from Chinese, including Chan Ho-Kei's The Borrowed, and also writes and translates plays. He lives in Brooklyn.
Rating: 5/5
This sounds like a highly interesting book. Thanks for the review.
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