Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. In Hong Kong Noir, fourteen of the city’s finest authors explore the dark heart of the Pearl of the Orient in haunting stories of depravity and despair.
What people are saying:
“But perhaps the most powerful of these paranormal tales is Carmen Suen’s ‘Fourteen,’ a poignant and vivid (almost) coming-of-age tale of a lonely twelve-year-old girl in a public housing estate in the 70s.”—Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
“Fourteen by Carmen Suen is an utterly gripping and heartwrenching story of the escape of friendship. Two girls become friends in the Wah Ming House of the Wah Fu estate in tiny council flats, growing up in poverty, the older girl being in a single parent family. Lit ‘Fun was as much a luxury as privacy. When you’re poor, you learn to live without both’.”—Ivy Ngeow, author of Cry of the Flying Rhino and Heart of Glass
“Hong Kong Noir digs below the financial centre’s gleaming surface to unearth stories of the city’s ghosts and spirits . . . The stories touch on major points in Hong Kong modern history: the horrors of Japanese occupation, post-war poverty, the economic boom under the British, the city’s return to Chinese sovereignty, and the tensions of the 2014 ‘umbrella movement’ occupation of key thoroughfares by pro-democracy activists. What better way to tie together the present and the past – the living and the dead – than through ghost stories?”—South China Morning Post
“Hong Kong’s rapid urbanisation, beginning with the city’s first public housing estate, sets the stage for Carmen Suen’s ‘Fourteen’.”—Zolima CityMag
“The history of Hong Kong, once a fishing village, encompasses piracy, the opium trade, prostitution, corruption, espionage and revolutionary plots; grist for the 14 dark tales in Hong Kong Noir.”—BBC Culture
“Now in the 14th year of its Noir series–which has collected original stories from Brooklyn to Istanbul to Lagos–Akashic has assembled a delightfully dark collection of fiction from Hong Kong, a city where talk is cheap and cash is still king.”—Ritz-Carlton Magazine, Page Turner pick for Winter 2018 and Recommended by Albert Wan of Bleak House Books
“Ng and Blumberg-Kason defy the fates by presenting a collection of 14 stories—by Chinese tradition, an ominous number—illustrating their city’s dark side…Ng and Blumberg-Kason’s Hong Kong is a city on the brink, haunted by its past but facing an uncertain future. Readers can feel lucky to have such a collection.”—Kirkus Reviews
“the number 14 is ‘about as bad as it gets in Hong Kong.’ The rough equivalent of 13 in the West, it’s pronounced ‘sup say’ in Cantonese. ‘It sounds like sut sei—must die,’ according to Carmen Suen’s unsettling ‘Fourteen,’ in which a poor 12-year-old girl looking for friendship in a public housing estate gets a supernatural shock.”—Publisher Weekly
“Hong Kong is a city of breathtaking highs and earth-shattering lows, luxury and poverty, excess and want, and this new collection of 14 tales from Hong Kong’s best crime writers showcases the extremes of one of the world’s capitals. From ghost stories, to historical thrills, to underworld brutality, Hong Kong Noir, like the city it captures, is as endlessly fascinating as it is impossible to define.”—CrimeReads
Carmen Suen Writes 