✪ Winner of the Golden Tripod Award
✪ Winner of the Taiwan Literature Award
✪ A New York Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2022

“Chen has done a masterful job of managing his material, creating multidimensional characters, a beautifully realized setting, and an opposite surprise ending.” -- Booklist (Starred Review)

“Vibrant and tartly observant. …A highly recommended story of past, identity, and family.” -- Library Journal (Starred Review)

Keith Chen, the only and desperately yearned for son of a traditional Taiwanese family with five daughters, runs away from the oppression of his village to Berlin in the hope of finding acceptance as a young gay man.

The novel begins a decade later, when Chen has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. He is about to return to his family’s village, a poor and desolate place. With his parents gone, his sisters married, mad, or dead, there is nothing left for him there. As the story unfurls, we learn what tore this family apart and, more importantly, the truth behind the murder of Chen’s boyfriend.

Told in a myriad of voices, both living and dead, and moving through time with deceptive ease, GHOST TOWN weaves a mesmerizing web of family secrets and countryside superstitions, the search for identity and clash of cultures.