Second Sister
Kuhusu kitabu hiki cha kusikiliza
Chan Ho-Kei’s The Borrowed was one of the most acclaimed international crime novels of recent years, a vivid and compelling tale of power, corruption, and the law, spanning five decades of the history of Hong Kong. Now he delivers Second Sister, an up-to-the-minute tale of a Darwinian digital city where everyone from tech entrepreneurs to teenagers is struggling for the top.
A schoolgirl—Siu-Man—has committed suicide, leaping from her twenty-second floor window to the pavement below. Siu-Man was an orphan, and Nga-Yee, the librarian older sister who’d been raising her, refuses to believe there was no foul play—although nothing seemed amiss. She contacts a man known only as N—a hacker and an expert in cyber-security and manipulating human behavior. But can Nga-Yee interest him sufficiently to take her case, and can she afford it if he says yes?
What follows is a cat-and-mouse game through the city of Hong Kong and its digital underground, especially an online gossip platform, where someone has been slandering Siu-Man.
The novel is also populated by a man harassing girls on mass transit; high school kids, with their competing agendas and social dramas; a Hong Kong digital company courting an American venture capitalist; and the Triads, market women and noodle shop proprietors who frequent N’s neighborhood of Sai Wan.
In the end, it all comes together to tell us who caused Siu-Man’s death and why, and to ask—in a world where online and offline dialogue has forgotten about the real people on the other end—what is the proper punishment?
Kuhusu mwandishi
Chan Ho-Kei was born and raised in Hong Kong, where he still lives. He has worked as a software engineer, script writer, game designer, and editor of comic magazines. Chan’s first novel, The Man Who Sold the World, won the Soji Shimada Mystery Award and was published in five languages. His novel The Borrowed was published in more than ten countries, and has been acquired for a film by acclaimed director Wong Kar-Wai.
Jeremy Tiang is a Singaporean writer, translator, and playwright based in New York City. He has translated more than ten books from Chinese and was recently honored as the London Book Fair's inaugural Translator in Residence.
Nancy Wu is an award-winning narrator who has worked in animation, television, theater, and film. Having lived and recorded all over the world, she is known for her vivid action/fantasy characters, accents, and bringing literature and nonfiction equally to life. A graduate of Amherst College with her master's degree in human rights, she is an avid Ashtanga yoga practitioner and rock climber. Born and raised in West Virginia, she currently resides in Boulder, Colorado.
