Connecting is not easy, but proximity is unbearable. The characters in these ten stories are longing for escape and attempt to leave home, but inevitably and perhaps ironically find themselves homesick. Chih-Ying Lay, a Montreal-based expatriate from Taiwan familiar with both homesickness and home sickness, probes our desperate need for home, often matched with an equally desperate need to get away from it. Lay’s characters are outsiders, whether queer, indigenous, unloved or lost, and each discovers that home is not the sanctuary it was meant to be. Sometimes, they find a place to call their very own, as if to tell the reader: You can, too.

Born in Taipei, Chih-Ying Lay came to Canada in 2008 to obtain his Ph.D. in Microbiology at McGill University. His first collection, published in Taiwan under the title The Escapist (2008), includes stories awarded the Formosa Literature Prize in 2005 and the Liberty Times Literature Prize in 2006. He has since published a novel, The Ideal Family (2012), and another collection of short fiction, The Comic Lives of Losers (2016). A guest broadcaster both in Taiwan (2007) and for Radio Canada International in Montreal (2016), he sings in Ensemble Sainte-Anne Singers and Musica Orbium and works as a senior research scientist in Montreal.

Chih-Ying Lay's profile page

Darryl Sterk has been translating Mandarin-language fiction from Taiwan and occasionally from China for a dozen years, most notably Wu Ming-Yi's two novels The Man With the Compound Eyes (Harvill Secker, 2013) and The Stolen Bicycle (Text, 2017), which was longlisted for the Booker International. For Linda Leith Publishing, he has translated Xue Yiwei's Shenzheners (2016) and Dr. Bethune's Children (2017) and Home Sickness (LLP, 2020) by Chih Ying Lay. Originally from Edmonton, Darryl Sterk lives in Hong Kong.

Darryl Sterk's profile page