In the mountainous city of Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition: a music box ballerina named Aliss who tantalizingly springs to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the sinister forces encroaching on his city and the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty. Thrumming with secrets and shape-shifting geographies, Dorothy Tse’s extraordinary debut novel is a boldly inventive exploration of life under repressive conditions.

Yam Gong is a leading Hong Kong poet who has worked as a laborer since adolescence and produced many of his poems during his work breaks. An outsider poet, he explores the synthesis of everyday life and philosophical inquiry. Using shifting tonal registers, he refashions borrowed language, including English song lyrics, Cantonese wordplay, Chinese folk stories and poems, news reports, prayers, and slang. This bilingual volume is the first book-length collection of Yam Gong’s poems in English, drawing from his most important work over the past forty years. Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong is the fourth title in Zephyr’s Hong Kong Atlas series, the only series in the world to showcase Hong Kong poetry in English.