BATSHIT SEVEN
Penguin, 20 Feb 2024 - Fiction - 256 pages
From Governor General's Award-nominated author Sheung-King comes a novel about a millennial living through the Hong Kong protests, as he struggles to make sense of modern life and the parts of himself that just won’t gel.
Glen Wu (aka Glue) couldn’t care less about his job. He’s returned to Hong Kong, the city he grew up in, and he’s teaching ESL, just to placate his parents. But he shows up hungover to class, barely stays awake, and prefers to spend his time smoking up until dawn breaks.
As he watches the city he loves fall—the protests, the brutal arrests—life continues around him. So he drinks more, picks more fights with his drug dealer friend, thinks loftier thoughts about the post-colonial condition and Frantz Fanon. The very little he does care about: his sister, who deals with Hong Kong’s demise by getting engaged to a rich immigration consultant; his on-and-off-again relationship with a woman who steals things from him; and memories of someone he once met in Canada....
When the government tightens its grip, language starts to lose all meaning for Glue, and he finds himself pulled into an unsettling venture, ultimately culminating in an act of violence.
Inventive and utterly irresistible, with QR codes woven throughout, Sheung-King’s ingenious novel encapsulates the anxieties and apathies of the millennial experience. Batshit Seven is an ode to a beloved city, an indictment of the cycles of imperialism, and a reminder of the beautiful things left under the hype of commodified living.
“Sheung-King has crafted a novel of dazzling scope: global and deeply personal, all at once. It’s uncompromisingly honest, smart, and hilarious—in the best, saddest way.”
—Kai Thomas, author of In the Upper Country
“Sheung-King’s erudite riffs on language, meaning, and the constantly dislocating experiences of modern existence makes Batshit Seven surprising, bizarre, and perhaps most of all, fun.”
—Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time
“Like a glass-bottom boat tour of the millennial mind.”
—Michael LaPointe, author of The Creep
“A wild and twisted symphony of concise, staccato writing and crescendoing narrative. . . . I was transfixed from the opening note to the closing word. This novel truly shows how different literary worlds can crash together in devastatingly cool ways. Another masterpiece of fiction from one of the freshest voices in Asian Canadian lit today.”
—Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.
“Playful, energetic, and propelled by hypnotic prose, Batshit Seven is a cunning dissection of our corporate age. Our hero, Glue, is vulnerable as he is foolish, trapped as much by his own mistakes as those set by the world around him. Elegantly styled and full of raucous humour, Sheung-King has wrought a precise, glimmering gem that twists and turns in the mind long after it’s read.”
—Adnan Khan, author of There Has to Be a Knife
PRAISE
“Glue has an intricate understanding of what ails him and his homeland of Hong Kong, but he’s paralyzed by his status as a transnational, neither here nor there. This grimly hilarious book asks if imperialism does this to us by accident, or on purpose—but also, it doesn’t matter. An astonishingly unflinching account of the spiritual wasteland where ‘global’ ‘citizens’ live; how it feels to have your personhood hollowed out by market forces, empire, and migration.”
—Thea Lim, author of An Ocean of Minutes
“Sociopolitically trenchant and darkly witty, Batshit Seven captures what it’s like to be a millennial in the age of COVID-19 as a hyphenated, transnational person in a city being dismantled by both political oppression and End Times capitalism. Sheung-King writes unerringly and convincingly about Hong Kong, privilege, Chinese families, lost loves, and so much more.”
—Kevin Chong, author of The Double Life of Benson Yu
“A soaring story told with ease, Batshit Seven entertains without erasing the haggard dimensions of modern millennial life that so fully shape this story. When I tell you this book turns such spectacle into its more honest shadow, I mean, read it and see. . . . the human cost of what’s hidden when powerful forces put contemporary life under siege. One thing’s for sure, we can thank Sheung-King later.”
—Canisia Lubrin, author of Code Noir
“Glue is sticky. Sticky with Hong Kong heat and sex. Glue is stuck. Stuck to news of political protests and embedded in the ‘complex workings of Asia,’ he wishes sometimes for oblivion, but his ticker tape thoughts keep him going and keep him motoring this wonderfully strange and sage story. This is a book to be read for escape, in the best sense—escape from lasting imperialist ideas and the imperilling hollowness of late capitalism. . . . Escape into the soul-rebuilding pleasures of a deliciously subversive imagination.”
—Kyo Maclear, author of Unearthing
YOU ARE EATING AN ORANGE. YOU ARE NAKED
Finalist for the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction Finalist for the 2021 Amazon First Novel Award Longlisted for CBC Books 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.
PRAISE
“A tale of two rich and rootless people that oozes the horror and confusion of love, while staying somehow still desperately romantic, and so gloriously sad. This novel is also about something else: it gives the cold shoulder to the dominant gaze and its demands to control the Asian body, carving out a thrilling space beyond whiteness. I didn’t want it to end.” —Thea Lim, author of An Ocean of Minutes, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
“Sheung-King has written a wonderfully unexpected and maverick love story but also a novel of ideas that hopscotches between Toronto, Macau, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Prague. It is enchanting, funny, and a joy to read.”
—Kyo Maclear, author of Birds Art Life, winner of the Trillium Book Award
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PRESS COVERAGE
“In a cruel paradox for writers who are just trying to recount their lives, the tropes of diasporic lit have made it nearly impossible to write about belonging without also placing whiteness at the center of attention—the tropes exist because stories that do this are regularly rewarded with publication. But You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. sidesteps this trap all together: It is bored by Western approval.” — Thea Lim, The Nation.
“Do yourself a favour: get a six-pack of Tsingtao and start reading this book; prepare to reread when you realize with dismay that it’s just too damn short.” — Jessica Poon, The Ormsby Review
"If you have ever been young and in love, Sheung-King’s novel You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. will transport you there again". — Michelle Cyca, the Vancouver Sun
“This rare, arresting book asks the reader to hold a pair of lovers close. A beautiful, intelligent portrait of estrangement and intimacy.” —Casey Plett, Chatelaine
“You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. shines in the way it challenges “classic” (read: European) notions of form and structure. The book is told in the second person, defying the more commonly used first- or third-person perspectives, to put the reader – no matter your background – inside the narrator’s lived experienced.” —Jen Rawlinson, Hamilton Review of Books
In “You Are Eating An Orange. You Are Naked.” the 2010s have never looked so 1770s —Brett Josef Grubisic, Toronto Star
“Sheung-King’s You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. is an enthralling debut.” —Amanda Brown, The Puritan
“For anyone interested in the intertwining of taste, texture, and the people we love, this collection is the perfect gift.” —Gift Guide Week: Natasha Ramoutar, All Lit Up
“This is a conversational novel, yet Sheung-King is equally interested in all the places language can’t reach. Through his precise prose, he conjures the inarticulable emotions of longing and heartbreak. If you have ever been young and in love, this book will transport you there again.” —Michelle Cyca, Vancouver Sun