SHANGHAI DANCING Brian Castro

Shanghai Dancing is a fictional autobiography by popular Australian author Brian Castro, based on his family's life in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau from the 1930's to the 1960's. This book is quite hard to find.

This is a used book in good, read condition: cover has a few creases; light corner wear; pages aging at the edges. See photos for cover blurb and sample page(s). The book in the photos is the actual book you will receive - we never use stock pictures - enjoy!

Publisher's blurb: Shanghai Dancing marks the U.S. debut of the major Australian literary figure, Brian Castro. A "fictional autobiography," Shanghai Dancing is a dazzling meditation on identity, language and disorientation by a writer who has been compared to W.G. Sebald. The book follows narrator Antonio Castro from Australia to his Hong Kong birthplace. The trip occasions an exploration of family myths and secrets that encompass Jewish, Portuguese, Chinese and English forebears and that extends from religious persecution in the Inquisition to the frenzied decadence that preceded Japan's invasion of Shanghai to the 1999 handover of Hong Kong to contemporary Australia. One of Castro's forefathers is burned at the stake; another smuggles the bones of Christian martyrs from Japan. His grandparents include a red-haired, green-eyed Jewess, a Chinese surgeon with a fetish for bound feet, and a Lilipudlian missionary. In Shanghai Dancing, Castro employs a sophisticated, sensual prose as well as maps, photographs, documents and letters to explore the evanescence of a shifting, polyglot world. Awarded some of Australia's most prestigious literary prizes, the book has been called, "impressive as history, as fiction, as a book which stretches the literary form and which speaks to the universality of the human experience."

Book Details

Code: SKU1066

Condition: See notes and photos below

Binding: Large Paperback

Pages: 447

Published: 2003 by Giramondo, Australia

ISBN: 0957831188

Postage: $6.90

Price: AUD $10.00