Ghost Cities

Name: Ghost Cities
Brand: University of Queensland Press
Price: 23.75 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

Miles Franklin Literary Award 2025 Winner

By: Siang Lu

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Paperback | 4 August 2026

At a Glance

Format
Paperback

Dimensions(cm)
0.1 x 0.1 x 0.1

Paperback

RRP $24.99

$23.75

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Available: 4th August 2026

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Winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Ghost Cities is a profound and highly imaginative novel that cleverly draws on Chinese history to explore the absurdity of modern life and work.

Ghost Cities - inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China - 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.

How is his relocation to one such 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 re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art?

Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino.

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