‘[A] surreal fantasy and the reading experience is demanding ... you might ask yourself if it's worth the effort. On reaching the end you will surely conclude that it is ... a very brave book.’
— David Mills, The Times
‘It’s tempting to call Owlish a fantasy, or an anti-fairytale. The book is not shy of drawing in references, including to Mephistopheles, Kant, the Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll, Kafka, Orwell and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. However, Tse’s acerbic, freewheeling spirit is generically flirtatious, rather than genre-bound. She steals from the western canon with chutzpah and panache to create a subversive tale about perilous desire, high-rise bureaucracy and sophisticated corruption in a defenceless city under siege… Owlish wittily captures a recent crisis moment in Hong Kong, exploring a discombobulating state caught between civilisation and its discontents.’
—Kit Fan, Guardian
‘In Owlish, nimbly translated by Natascha Bruce, there are several nods to Franz Kafka and Tse offers a powerful vision of government repression.... Tse combines the banal and the fantastic to terrific effect. Full of striking imagery, Owlish is a vertiginous tale of a people sleepwalking into catastrophe.’
— Lucy Popescu, Financial Times
‘Beguilingly eerie, richly textured, the pages of Owlish are drenched in strange beauty and menace. Like all the best fairy tales, it reveals the dark truths that we would rather not look at directly, and does so with a surreal and singular clarity.’
— Sophie Mackintosh, author of Cursed Bread
‘Dorothy Tse is a magnificent historian of unreal places. Her sage and serious characters are cast adrift in realities that are neither sage nor serious at all – and possibly impossible. Her parallel worlds and paradoxes brilliantly illuminate our own reality, with all its fictions masquerading as facts (and vice versa). Boundlessly creative, richly philosophical – I loved this book.’
— Joanna Kavenna, author of Zed
‘Tse joins the ranks of artists currently remaking the world, from Yoko Tawada to César Aira.’
— Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne
‘Owlish is so delightfully creepy, wonderful and strange.’
— Camilla Grudova, author of Children of Paradise
‘A bold, brilliantly absorbing read. This clever, mercurial portrait of an alternate Hong Kong lingers long after the last page.’
— Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch
‘Owlish [is] a darkly sexual sociopolitical fable…Tse’s excellent novel becomes increasingly bizarre.’
— Hal Jensen, TLS
