City Like Water ~ Dorothy Tse and Natascha Bruce in conversation

All welcome to join us at The Leeds Library as we celebrate the launch of City Like Water, by Dorothy Tse, and translated by Natascha Bruce (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026). Dorothy Tse is one of Hong Kong's most exciting authors and the novel has already received rave reviews.

Dorothy and Natascha, great friends of our Centre, will be in conversation about the work, followed by Q&A.

Dorothy Tse is a writer from Hong Kong. She is the author of Owlish, City Like Water and the short story collection Snow and Shadow, translated by Nicky Harman, which was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. A cofounder of the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres, she has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award.

Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese, and we are particularly proud that she launched her career as joint-winner of our Centre's inaugural Bai Meigui translation competition, back in 2015. Her work includes novels and story collections by Yeng Pway Ngon, Patigül, Ho Sok Fong and Can Xue, as well as the novels Owlish and City Like Water by Dorothy Tse. Her translation of Owlish was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize and named one of the New Yorker’s best books of 2023. She lives in Amsterdam.

Publisher's synopsis:

The city you grew up in is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it – counterfeit watches, streets echoing with the sound of stilettos, and even some of your classmates and teachers. Then the disappearances come closer to home. Your mother joins a housewives’ protest over fake lotus roots only to be turned into a statue by the police. Your father is quietly absorbed into the enormous TV gifted by the government, reappearing in the background of soap operas. And didn’t you once have a little sister, before she flew away? As the police go undercover and transform your neighbourhood into a violent labyrinth you can no longer navigate, where does this leave you? Lucid, nightmarish and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous tale of a city not so different from your own.

The event will be in English and all are welcome but please sign up on our TicketTailor page (opens new tab) -- it is free to attend, but donations to the upkeep of this beautiful library will be much appreciated. Bar available.

Please note the venue is on Commercial Street, near to Trinity Shopping Centre, not to be confused with Leeds City Library, which is on the Headrow!). Those of you who have followed our Centre may remember a previous event with Dorothy and Natascha on their last collaborative project, in 2000 at the same venue -- we are very excited to welcome them back.

Selected reviews (more on the Fitzcarraldo website -- links open new tabs)

‘[City Like Water] is an unclassifiable, sharp, ingenious, passionate novel in which the city that is dissolving is also one’s only home.’
— Madeleine Thien, Guardian

‘Through the vibrancy of his account, Tse binds us to our narrator, even as he remains apathetic to the damage mounting before his eyes. Strip away the magical devices, and the novel describes the loneliness that enfolds and isolates people as popular movements flag, as the gravity disperses, and brighter possible futures are extinguished. In City Like Water, Tse suggests that so long as its citizens conserve the memory of their distinct and irrepressible city, whether in prison or exile, a chink of hope remains.’
— Katherine Waters, The Telegraph

‘The seductive beauty of Tse’s writing has won her awards, and is perceptively captured by Natascha Bruce, who also translated Tse’s much praised first novel, Owlish. Dazzling imagery carries the narrative – and the city itself – far out to sea, as Kafka and Borges, old masters of the surreal and avuncular figures, look on approvingly from the shore.’
— Lee Langley, Spectator

‘For all its undefined setting and its allegorical atmosphere, City Like Water brims with specific details – for instance, oblique references to umbrellas, emblems of political protest – reminding us that the storytelling here, too, is fuelled by rage. In her translation, Bruce once again delivers an English version infused with both beauty and terror, showing how easily the language of dreams can become the language of nightmares.’
— Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times

‘Dorothy Tse’s stunning novella City Like Water fictionalizes the quiet dissent of a city unravelling.… Her poetic prose is lusciously translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce, who previously collaborated with Tse on her groundbreaking debut novel, Owlish. Tse’s work refuses to forget what has often been censored, observing the surreal within the mundane. City Like Water reminds us to pay careful attention.’
— Annie Hayter, Big Issue

‘City Like Water is playful, and it is sinister. Tse blends these moods and twists inside a surreal, hypnotic cityscape, accented by ferocious bursts that will describe – for example – the thud of a falling body using the image of a meteor that bores through the narrator’s skull, turns it to coral, and crushes her at the bottom of a black ocean. Tse’s piece, short enough to call a novella, is experimental without pause. But its maze of impressionistic anxiety, sensory overload, and random reality shifts are not purely aesthetic. The maze and its terrors are means for insight into a place in time where place and time – and the will to live, the why to live – are becoming unmoored.’
— Angus Stewart, Asian Review of Books

‘The narrative emerges as a series of phantasmagorical vignettes, in chapters whose titles largely correspond to the stages of the 2019 Hong Kong protest movement.… The city and its residents are in a state of dizzying flux. A restaurant turns into a ship, birds turn into books, buildings droop like octopus tentacles, cities turn into paper, ears turn into bloodied butterflies, and people mutate as they eat wonton noodles…. This is an allegory of the displacement felt by the exhausted people of Hong Kong as they witnessed the post-protest transformation of the territory by forces beyond their control.’
— Louisa Lim, New York Review of Books

‘In Bruce’s dizzy, delightful translation, Tse summons a world that magnifies and probes the seam between dark dream and heart-rending reality. Engaging and exhilaratingly inventive, encrusted with beguiling detail, City Like Water paints a metropolis like no other – and every other.’
— Polly Barton, author of What Am I, A Deer?