Published in 2025
240 pages
Hon Lai Chu is one of Hong Kong’s most prominent writers and the author of several novels, including Mending Bodies, Degravitation Zone, and A Dictionary of Two Cities, co-authored with Dorothy Tse, which won the Hong Kong Book Prize. Her most recent works are Half-Eclipse and Darkness under the Sun, two diaristic essay collections about Hong Kong. She has also received accolades from Taiwan’s Unitas Literary Association, the Liang Shiu-chiu Literature Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, and the Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature, among many others.
Jacqueline Leung is a writer and translator from Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in Wasafiri, Transtext(e)s Transcultures, Gulf Coast, Asymptote, Nashville Review, SAND Journal, the Asian Review of Books, Books From Taiwan, and elsewhere. She is a translator editor at The Offing. Her excerpt of Mending Bodies is a winner of PEN Presents by the English PEN. This is her first full-length translation.
What is this book about?
In a failing city, a government program incentivizes couples to “conjoin”—surgically attach themselves to one another—promising a flourishing economy, ecological revitalization, and personal fulfillment.
A student writing her dissertation on the program’s history begins to suffer from insomnia. As her world unravels and under the weight of expectations by both society and her close friends, she worries that maybe they are all right when they tell her it would be better—for the good of another person and for the good of the country—to sacrifice everything that she is and get conjoined. Mending Bodies blends body horror and political allegory to explore a world where even the motives of those you love most are shaped by larger forces.
