You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. - Paperback

by Sheung-King (Author)

Finalist for the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
Finalist for the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award
Longlisted for Canada Reads 2021

Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award

A Globe and Mail Best Book Debut of 2020

A young translator living in Toronto frequently travels abroad--to Hong Kong, Macau, Prague, Tokyo--often with his unnamed lover. In restaurants and hotel rooms, the couple begin telling folk tales to each other, perhaps as a way to fill the undefined space between them. Theirs is a comic and enigmatic relationship in which emotions are often muted and sometimes masked by verbal play and philosophical questions, and further complicated by the woman's frequent unexplained disappearances.

You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. is an intimate novel of memory and longing that challenges Western tropes and Orientalism. Embracing the playful surrealism of Haruki Murakami and the atmospheric narratives of filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, Sheung-King's debut is at once lyrical and punctuated, and wholly unique, and marks the arrival of a bold new voice in Canadian literature.

Author Biography

Sheung-King is a writer and educator originally from Hong Kong. His work has appeared in PRISM International, The Shanghai Literary Review, and The Humber Literary Review, among others. His debut book, You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked., was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and was longlisted for CBC Canada Reads. He currently lives in China.