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Batshit Seven
Current price:
$24.95
Publication Date: February 20th, 2024
Publisher:
Penguin Canada
ISBN:
9780735245303
Pages:
336
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(New Fiction Hardcover)
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Description
From Governor General's Award-nominated author Sheung-King comes a novel about a millennial living through the Hong Kong protests, as he struggles to make sense of modern life and the parts of himself that just won’t gel.
Glen Wu (aka Glue) couldn’t care less about his job. He’s returned to Hong Kong, the city he grew up in, and he’s teaching ESL, just to placate his parents. But he shows up hungover to class, barely stays awake, and prefers to spend his time smoking up until dawn breaks.
As he watches the city he loves fall—the protests, the brutal arrests—life continues around him. So he drinks more, picks more fights with his drug dealer friend, thinks loftier thoughts about the post-colonial condition and Frantz Fanon. The very little he does care about: his sister, who deals with Hong Kong’s demise by getting engaged to a rich immigration consultant; his on-and-off-again relationship with a woman who steals things from him; and memories of someone he once met in Canada....
When the government tightens its grip, language starts to lose all meaning for Glue, and he finds himself pulled into an unsettling venture, ultimately culminating in an act of violence.
Inventive and utterly irresistible, with QR codes woven throughout, Sheung-King’s ingenious novel encapsulates the anxieties and apathies of the millennial experience. Batshit Seven is an ode to a beloved city, an indictment of the cycles of imperialism, and a reminder of the beautiful things left under the hype of commodified living.
Praise for Batshit Seven
PRAISE FOR BATSHIT SEVEN
“[Sheung-King] presents [Glue’s] story with the restrained force of an ethnographic study. The result is . . . incredibly powerful, rendering Batshit Seven a highly unusual, highly effective examination of both contemporary society and the quest for identity.”
—Toronto Star
"Glen Wu has returned to Hong Kong to teach English, even as China tightens its grip on the city in a new form of colonialism. Governor General’s Literary Award–nominated Sheung-King weaves a colourful, inventive tale about a disaffected millennial struggling to understand the world and his own identity during a time of change."
—Quill & Quire
"Glue has an intricate understanding of what ails him and his homeland of Hong Kong, but he's paralyzed by his status as a transnational, neither here nor there. This grimly hilarious book asks if imperialism does this to us by accident, or on purpose—but also, it doesn't matter. An astonishingly unflinching account of the spiritual wasteland where 'global' 'citizens' live; how it feels to have your personhood hollowed out by market forces, empire, and migration."
—Thea Lim, author of An Ocean of Minutes
"Sociopolitically trenchant and darkly witty, Batshit Seven captures what it's like to be a millennial in the age of COVID-19 as a hyphenated, transnational person in a city being dismantled by both political oppression and End Times capitalism. Sheung-King writes unerringly and convincingly about Hong Kong, privilege, Chinese families, lost loves, and so much more."
—Kevin Chong, author of The Double Life of Benson Yu
“A soaring story told with ease, Batshit Seven entertains without erasing the haggard dimensions of modern millennial life that so fully shape this story. When I tell you this book turns such spectacle into its more honest shadow, I mean, read it and see. . . . the human cost of what’s hidden when powerful forces put contemporary life under siege. One thing’s for sure, we can thank Sheung-King later.”
—Canisia Lubrin, author of Code Noir
“Glue is sticky. Sticky with Hong Kong heat and sex. Glue is stuck. Stuck to news of political protests and embedded in the 'complex workings of Asia,' he wishes sometimes for oblivion, but his ticker tape thoughts keep him going and keep him motoring this wonderfully strange and sage story. This is a book to be read for escape, in the best sense—escape from lasting imperialist ideas and the imperilling hollowness of late capitalism. . . . Escape into the soul-rebuilding pleasures of a deliciously subversive imagination."
—Kyo Maclear, author of Unearthing
"Sheung-King has crafted a novel of dazzling scope: global and deeply personal, all at once. It’s uncompromisingly honest, smart, and hilarious—in the best, saddest way."
—Kai Thomas, author of In the Upper Country
"Sheung-King’s erudite riffs on language, meaning, and the constantly dislocating experiences of modern existence make Batshit Seven surprising, bizarre, and perhaps most of all, fun."
—Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time
"Like a glass-bottom boat tour of the millennial mind."
—Michael LaPointe, author of The Creep
“A wild and twisted symphony of concise, staccato writing and crescendoing narrative. . . . I was transfixed from the opening note to the closing word. This novel truly shows how different literary worlds can crash together in devastatingly cool ways. Another masterpiece of fiction from one of the freshest voices in Asian Canadian lit today.”
—Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.
"Playful, energetic, and propelled by hypnotic prose, Batshit Seven is a cunning dissection of our corporate age. Our hero, Glue, is vulnerable as he is foolish, trapped as much by his own mistakes as those set by the world around him. Elegantly styled and full of raucous humour, Sheung-King has wrought a precise, glimmering gem that twists and turns in the mind long after it's read."
—Adnan Khan, author of There Has to Be a Knife
“[A]n uncanny delight.”
—The British Columbia Review
