Strangers at the Red Door

A GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 100 BOOK OF THE YEAR

"The Giller-shortlisted novelist uses the fantastic to tell a thrilling tale of censorship and the artist’s need to tell their story." —The Globe and Mail

A foreign ghostwriter visiting Hong Kong partners up with the disembodied spirit of the most dangerous novelist in China to find a local bookseller who’s been disappeared by the authorities after attempting to smuggle the novelist’s subversive masterpiece onto the mainland

At a train station in China, three people meet, only two of whom are actually alive. The first is Faron Jones, on his way to Hong Kong to interview an Iranian film director-turned-dissident holed up in the Japanese consulate. The second is Mildred Chen, a Hong Kong bookseller detained at the border crossing for attempting to deliver copies of the most dangerous novel in China over to the mainland. The third is the deceased author of that very novel, Jiang Ming, now a wandering spirit trapped in the middle world between life and death.

Soon after this encounter, and for no reason he can understand, Faron learns that he’s suddenly acquired flawless Mandarin and Cantonese, languages only a day earlier he had no knowledge of. Slowly, the impossible truth that another man’s soul has joined his own and now speaks in his voice becomes maddeningly undeniable. With this comes Jiang Ming’s extraordinary claim and his urgent request of Faron, and so the ghostwriter and the spirit of the dead novelist trapped within him set upon a search for the one person—the disappeared bookseller—who’s able to deliver the Chinese novelist’s spirit to his final resting place.

Instantly propulsive, wholly original, and like a mirror for our current times, Strangers at the Red Door follows these characters and their quests for freedom, love, and reconciliation. It explores a world in which the boundaries of the physical and the spiritual blur; countries facing uncertain futures intersect; and the struggle of the artist against political oppression becomes an essential act of survival.