GHOST CITIES: A Novel, the trade of creating illusions at apotheosis

GHOST CITIES: A Novel
SIANG LU
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 25 August 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From an award-winning international rising star, a dazzlingly inventive novel, spanning ancient and modern China, that interweaves stories of romance and showbiz

Inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China, Ghost Cities 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. The incident goes viral under the hashtag #BadChinese and attracts the attention of the eccentric film director Baby Bao, who uses Lu to attract press for his latest film. Bao’s movie, based on ancient legends, is to be filmed in one of China’s “ghost cities”.

How is his relocation to a 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?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Xiang Lu...notice the author's first name's first letter is the sole difference in these names...is a man with excellent luck. Blagging his way into a job at the Sydney, Australia, consulate of China based on ethnicity and the ubiquity of Google Translate; getting fired when his incompetence at Chinese-language skills is exposed and then pilloried on social media; thereupon being discovered by a Chinese equivalent to Roger Corman, and getting hired to do the publicity on the guy's new film...no way could that be an unfolding, subtle plan on Xiang Lu's part, too much could go too wrong.

After joining Director "Baby Bao" in Port Man Tou, one of the infamous ghost cities of the title, Xiang Lu and Bao join a cast of thousands, and the spirits of Emperor Lu Huang Du and his willed-into-being alters across the multiverse. (Say the "Chinese" names aloud, more than once and with an approximate Aussie accent. It's a hoot.) The Wikipedia articles I've linked to offer some background will also afford a flattering angle of light on this slightly-too-long story, and should be read as they appear for best results. This story is subtle, is layered with jeux d'esprit, and that's the problem. Humor, satire oh dear oh my, is tough to convince people to read. Tristram Shandy and Candide aren't read as often as they're bought; and this skewering of the overweening egos that, in fact, summon their creators' visions into a weird kind of being is not at that celestial level.

Siang Lu is the 2025 Miles Franklin Award–winning author of this odd confection of past and present, reality as we know it and the self-aggrandizing reality-dismissing fantasies of two powerful creators of images. The Miles Franklin Award resembles the US Pulitzer Prize in that it is "...an annual literary prize awarded to 'a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases'." So we know the author is either born or based in Australia; the utter absence of any indication of a translator on this or his first novel, The Whitewash (no US publisher, but available on Ammy's Kindle via the Aussie publisher University of Queensland Press), and the fact he "holds a Master of Letters from the University of Sydney" all rather makes me think he either writes novels directly in English or her self-translates his work. Author Lu also "...has written for television on Malaysia's Astro network. In 2021, {he} won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer for The Whitewash. He is based in Brisbane, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia," (all from his Goodreads bio) so I'm betting he's pretty thoroughly polygot; there's no way in hell this read was made using Google Translate! So the opposite of Xiang Lu he writes in this novel, in other words.

As a story it was fun to read the ever-increasing parallel delusions of Baby Bao and Lu Huang Du, and those delusions' assuming a mirror corporeality and a deeply unsettling unity of purpose. It says so much about the visionaries of the world who dream big and act small and petty. Xiang and Baby Bao's assistant/translator/enabler Yuan (I believe this is a word for cash, get it?) are endlessly discussing how eerie it is that all Portmanteau...I mean Port Man Tou, of course I do!...are so indistinguishable, in their empty expensiveness, chewing over how it takes a powerful mind to snatch low-hanging fruit before others seize it...well, it's all very undergrad-philosophy, very obvious and ye I am absolutely certain that it will zoom over most heads like the starship Enterprise.

Maybe I'm just letting my inner old snob run the show. It made me snerk and chortle and even nod along once in a while. It's a good story, and a fine read. I'm not rating it a full five because I suspect most target readers will feel lost at key moments.

"You know," she {Yuan} says, looking out the window, "I have always had this silly thought that maybe, somehow, every city is the same. So when you go from one place to another, it's simply an illusion of flight. The take-off and landing is a simulation. In reality, you've never left the ground, or maybe you have, but are simply flying around in circles for hours, waiting for the new city to 'load.'"

Either too obvious or too weird or too simplistic, but too-too is likely to be a common response. I'm glad Author Siang made the story and that Simon & Schuster's international-lit imprint brought it out here in the US because it's the kind of story that skewers the pretensions and pretentiousness of people badly in need of it.

I'm so glad this story's coming out now, before the US version of #Jólabókaflóð that we prosaically call "fall new book releases" but are really the Yuletide rush. It could get buried now, of course, but I hope some few of y'all will see the appeal and feel the need to chortle along with Siang Lu and me.