Author: whatcathyreadnext

#BlogTour #Extract Second Sister by Chan Ho-Kei @HoZ_Books @midaspr

whatcathyreadnext

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Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for Second Sister by Chan Ho-Kei (translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang) and published in hardcover on 18th February 2020 by Head of Zeus. It’s also available as an ebook and audio book. Described as perfect for fans of hacker thrillers such as Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, I’m delighted to bring you an extract from the book below.

Thanks to Bei at Midas PR for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my digital review copy.

image001About the Book

Set against a backdrop of Hong Kong’s Umbrella protests a young woman investigates her teenage sister’s suicide, in this evocative and zeitgeisty crime novel from the acclaimed author of The Borrowed.

Upon discovering her fifteen-year-old sister’s body sprawled in a pool of blood at the bottom of their apartment block, Nga-Yee vows to serve justice to the internet troll she blames for her sister’s suicide. Hiring an anti-establishment, maverick tech-savvy detective, Nga-Yee discovers the dark side of social media, the smokescreen of online privacy and the inner workings of the hacker’s mind.

Determined to find out the truth about why her sister Siu-Man killed herself, Nga-Yee cannot rest until she finds out whose inflammatory social media post went viral and pushed her sister to her death. Along the way, Nga-Yee makes unsavoury discoveries about her sister’s life and the dark underbelly of the digital world.

Part detective novel, part revenge thriller, Second Sister explores themes of sexual harassment, internet bullying and teenage suicide – and vividly captures the zeitgeist of Hong Kong today.

Format: Hardcover (496 pages)             Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 18th February 2020 Genre: Crime, Thriller

Purchase links*
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Second Sister on Goodreads

Extract from Second Sister by Chan Ho-Kei

Chapter One

“Your sister killed herself.”

When Nga-Yee heard the policeman say these words in the mortuary, she couldn’t stop herself from blurting out, her speech slurred, “That’s impossible! You must have made a mistake, Siu-Man would never do such a thing.”

Sergeant Ching, a slim man of about fifty with a touch of gray at his temples, looked a littlelike a gangster, but something about his eyes told her she could trust him. Calm in the face of Nga-Yee’s near hysteria, he said something in his deep, steady voice that silenced her: “Miss Au, are you really certain your sister didn’t kill herself?”

Nga-Yee knew very well, even if she didn’t want to admit it to herself, that Siu-Man had ample reason to seek death. The pressure she’d been under for the last six months was much more than any fifteen-year-old girl should have to face.

But we should start with the Au family’s many years of misfortune.

Nga-Yee’s parents were born in the 1960s, second-generation immigrants. When war broke out between the Nationalists and Communists in 1946, large numbers of refugees began surging from the Mainland into Hong Kong. The Communists emerged victorious and brought in a new regime, cracking down on any opposition, and even more people started arriving in the safe haven of this British colony.

Nga-Yee’s grandparents were refugees from Guangzhou. Hong Kong needed a lot of cheap labor and rarely turned away people who entered the territory illegally, and her grandparents were able to put down roots, eventually getting their papers and becoming Hong Kongers. Even then, they led difficult existences, doing hard manual labor for long
hours and low wages. Their living conditions were terrible too. Still, Hong Kong was going through an economic boom, and as long as you were prepared to suffer a little, you could improve your circumstances. Some even rode the wave to real success.

Unfortunately, Nga-Yee’s grandparents never got the chance.

In February 1976 a fire in the Shau Kei Wan neighborhood on Aldrich Bay destroyed more than a thousand wooden houses, leaving more than three thousand people homeless. Nga-Yee’s grandparents died in this inferno, survived by a twelve-year-old child: Nga-Yee’s father, Au Fai. Not having any other family in Hong Kong, Au Fai was taken in by a neighbor who’d lost his wife in the fire. The neighbor had a seven-year-old daughter named Chau Yee-Chin. This was Nga-Yee’s mom.

Because they were so poor, Au Fai and Chau Yee-Chin didn’t have the chance for a real education. Both started work before coming of age, Au Fai as a warehouse laborer, Yee-Chin as a waitress at a dim sum restaurant. Although they had to toil for a living, they never complained, and they even managed to find a crumb of happiness when they fell in love. Soon they were talking of marriage. When Yee-Chin’s father fell ill in 1989,
they wed quickly so at least one of his wishes could be fulfilled before he died.

For a few years after that, the Au family seemed to have shaken themselves free of bad fortune.

Three years after their marriage, Au Fai and Chau Yee-Chin had a daughter. Yee-Chin’s father had been an educated youth in China. Before his death, he’d told them to call their child Chung-Long for a boy, Nga-Yee for a girl – “Nga” for elegance and beauty, “Yee” for joy.

The family of three moved into a small tenement flat in To Kwa Wan, where they lived a meager but contented existence. When Au Fai got back from work each day, the smiling faces of his wife and daughter made him feel that there was nothing more he could ask for in this world. Yee-Chin managed the household well. Nga-Yee was bookish and well-behaved, and all Au Fai wanted was to earn a little more money so she could go to university one day rather than having to get a job halfway through secondary school as he and his wife had had to do. Academic qualifications were now necessary to get ahead in Hong Kong. In the 1970s and ’80s you could get a job as long as you were willing to work hard, but times had changed.

When Nga-Yee was six, the god of fortune smiled on the Au family: after years on the waiting list, it was finally their turn to get a government flat. […]

Two years after moving into Wun Wah House, Chau Yee-Chin was pregnant again. Au Fai was delighted to be a father twice over, and Nga-Yee was old enough to understand that becoming an elder sister meant she’d have to work hard to help share her parents’ burden. Because his father-in-law had left only one name for each sex, Au Fai was stuck for a second girl’s name. He turned to their neighbor, a former schoolteacher, for help.

“How about calling her Siu-Man?” the old man suggested as they sat on a bench outside their building. “Sui as in ‘little’ and Man as in ‘clouds coloured by twilight.'”

Au Fai looked to where the old man was pointing and saw the setting sun turning the clouds a dazzling array of hues. “Au Siu-Man…that’s a nice-sounding name. Thanks for your help, Mr. Huang. I’m too ignorant to have ever come up with something so beautiful on my own.”

image003About the Author

Chan was born and raised in Hong Kong. He has worked as a software engineer, game designer, manga editor, and lecturer. Chan wrote made his debut as a writer in 2008 at the age of thirty-three, with the short story ‘The Case of Jack and the Beanstalk’ which was shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of Taiwan Award. Chan re-entered the following year and won the award for his short story ‘The Locked Room of Bluebeard’.

Chan reached the first milestone of his writing career in 2011 with his novel The Man who Sold the World which won the biggest mystery award in the Chinese speaking world, the Soji Shimada Award. The book has been published in Taiwan, Japan, Italy, Thailand and Korea.

In 2014, Chan’s crime thriller The Borrowed was published in Taiwan. It has sold rights in thirteen countries, and the book will be adapted into a film by acclaimed Chinese art film director Wong Kar-Wai. Second Sister has acquired a six-figure film deal with Linmon Pictures in China. The book will be published in the US in 2020 and rights have been sold to China, Korea and Japan.

Connect with Chan
Website | Twitter

About the Translator

Jeremy Tiang’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, Esquire and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. He has written four plays and translated more than ten books from the Chinese. Tiang lives in New York.

 

#WWWWednesday – 18th March 2020

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WWWWednesdays

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

Currently reading

A book for a blog tour and an ARC.

The Canary Keeper PBThe Canary Keeper by Clare Carson (paperback, review copy courtesy of Head of Zeus)

In the grey mist of the early morning a body is dumped on the shore of the Thames by a boatman in a metal canoe. The city is soon alive with talk of the savage Esquimaux stalking Victorian London and an eye witness who claims the killer had an accomplice: a tall woman dressed in widow’s weeds, with the telltale look of the degenerate Irish.

Branna ‘Birdie’ Quinn had no good reason to be by the river that morning, but she did not kill the man. She’d seen him first the day before, desperate to give her a message she refused to hear. And now the Filth will see her hang for his murder, just like her father.

To save her life, Birdie must trace the dead man’s footsteps. Back onto the ship that carried him to his death, back to cold isles of Orkney that sheltered him, and up to the far north, a harsh and lawless land which holds more answers than she looks to find…

A Thousand MoonsA Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry (eARC, courtesy of Faber & Faber and NetGalley)

Even when you come out of bloodshed and disaster in the end you have got to learn to live.

Narrated by Winona, the young Lakota orphan adopted by soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole in Days Without End, A Thousand Moons continues Sebastian Barry’s extraordinary fictional exploration of late nineteenth century America.

Living with Thomas and John on the farm they work in 1870s Tennessee, educated and loved, Winona is employed by the lawyer Briscoe in the nearby town of Paris, as she tries to forge a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. But the fragile harmony of this shared world, in the aftermath of the Civil War, is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront let alone understand.

Told in Sebastian Barry’s gorgeous, lyrical prose, A Thousand Moons is a powerful, moving study of one woman’s journey, about her determination to write her own future, and about the enduring human capacity for love.

Recently finished

Summer of the Three PagodasSummer of the Three Pagodas by Jean Moran (hardcover, courtesy of Head of Zeus)

A brilliantly exotic saga set in post-war Hong Kong and Korea, where Dr Rowena Rossiter longs to follow her heart, and her love, but the shadows of a violent past threaten to engulf her.

Hong Kong, 1950: Rowena’s daughter, conceived during the horrors of the Japanese invasion, is safely at boarding school. Her great love, Connor O’Connor, is by her side. But just as they begin planning a new life together, bad news comes. A female doctor is urgently needed in Seoul. The powers that be would like Rowena to go. At first she plans to refuse—until rumors begin to swirl that the sinister, beautiful man who held her captive during the war, may still be alive and looking for her. Korea on the brink of war seems safer by comparison. Except, that of course, it isn’t.

Containment CoverContainment (Sam Shephard #3) by Vanda Symon (ebook, courtesy of Orenda Books and Random Things Tours)

Chaos reigns in the sleepy village of Aramoana on the New Zealand coast, when a series of shipping containers wash up on the beach and looting begins.

Detective Constable Sam Shephard experiences the desperation of the scavengers first-hand, and ends up in an ambulance, nursing her wounds and puzzling over an assault that left her assailant for dead. What appears to be a clear-cut case of a cargo ship running aground soon takes a more sinister turn when a skull is found in the sand, and the body of a diver is pulled from the sea . . . a diver who didn’t die of drowning.

As first officer at the scene, Sam is handed the case, much to the displeasure of her superiors, and she must put together an increasingly confusing series of clues to get to the bottom of a mystery that may still have more victims. (Review to follow 22nd March as part of blog tour)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

The Walls We Build_EbookThe Walls We Build by Jules Hayes  (eARC, review copy courtesy of Rachel’s Random Resources)

Three Friends… Growing up together around Winston Churchill’s estate in Westerham, Kent, Frank, Florence and Hilda are inseparable. But as WW2 casts its menacing shadow, friendships between the three grow complex, and Frank – now employed as Churchill’s bricklayer – makes choices that will haunt him beyond the grave, impacting his grandson’s life too.

Two Secrets …Shortly after Frank’s death in 2002, Florence writes to Richard, Frank’s grandson, hinting at the darkness hidden within his family. On investigation, disturbing secrets come to light, including a pivotal encounter between Frank and Churchill during the war and the existence of a mysterious relative in a psychiatric hospital.

​One Hidden Life … How much more does Florence dare reveal about Frank – and herself – and is Richard ready to hear?

​Set against the stunning backdrop of Chartwell, Churchill’s country home, comes a tragic story of misguided honour, thwarted love and redemption, reverberating through three generations and nine decades.