The Year of the Shanghai Shark
The Year of the Shanghai Shark - Mo Zhi Hong
Penguin Group (NZ), ISBN 978-014300-893-4, $28.00 pbk
This is a sophisticated story of China’s new generation severing ties with their cultural past, rich with a fascinating array of colourful characters who frequent their inner-city apartment block. Hai Long is a teenager and as we meet a series of colourful characters in Hai Long’s life, we also watch him being trained in the ways of the pick-pocket.
Mo Zhi Hong was born in Singapore but grew up in Taiwan, Canada, China, the United States of America and New Zealand. During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, he worked as a software developer in New York City, and later as an English teacher in north-east China, before recently returning to New Zealand. He is 34 years old. This is his first novel.
Shanghai Shark won Best First Book in the South-east Asia and Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for 2009.
Bookmark/Search this post with