Sixteen exquisite stories exploring recentChinese migration to Australia and elsewhere, exploring intergenerational andinterracial relationships, the search for meaning, and the effects of isolationand the inability to express oneself in a second language.

Best-selling author, Debra Adelaide, saysIsabelle Li's prose is powerful, exquisite and finely tuned, and each storydraws us deeper into the complex emotional and cultural dilemmas of characterswho are solitary, sensitive, perceptive and powerless, sometimes all at once.

'What does it take to master a second language, to be so skilled in that language that you're published in it? Chinese/Australian writer and translator Isabelle Li reminds us that learning to love an adopted language does not come without its struggles.' ABC Radio National

"Moody and slow-burning with moments of startlingrevelation... Li crafts some exquisite, sometimesshocking scenes (often of cruelty or loss), then allows dramatic tension to sagin-between with long passages of meandering description." -The SaturdayPaper

Reviewed here in the Sydney Morning Herald