Ghost Forest: Book Talk with Pik-Shuen Fung

Pik-Shuen Fung‘s powerful debut, Ghost Forest explores migration and grief, joy and sorrow, through the eyes of an unnamed protagonist as she travels through the collective memories of her family. Through spirited prose, Ghost Forest reminds readers that “grief, memory, and history are never linear but always alive” K-Ming Chang

Join us Saturday October 8, 2022 at 3:00pm for a book talk with author Pik-Shuen Feng featuring her novel Ghost Forest. This intergenerational novel, told in vignettes, is a beautiful exploration of loss, love, and the layers in between.

Masks are required.

There will be also simultaneously be a virtual livestream:

This “powerful” (Buzzfeed) debut about love, grief, and family welcomes you into its pages and invites you to linger, staying with you long after you’ve closed its covers.

How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings?

This is the question the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong “astronaut” fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China.

As she revisits memories of her father throughout the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs.

Buoyant, heartbreaking, and unexpectedly funny, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese Canadian astronaut family.

Pik-Shuen Fung is the author of the debut novel Ghost Forest, which won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. She has received fellowships and residencies from Kundiman, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Millay Arts, and Storyknife, and her writing has appeared in Guernica, LitHub, Poets & Writers, The Italian Review, and elsewhere. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, Canada, she now lives in New York City with her husband and their rambunctious dog.

Host or Publisher Eastwind Books of Berkeley