From Kevin Chen, Ghost Town is a stunning novel about a small town in the Taiwan countryside and a family haunted by their own ghosts. We flit between time frames and points of view to paint a complex portrait of the Chens, a large family plagued by loss, globalisation, and secrets. The youngest of seven, Chen Tienhong (or Keith) leaves the village for Berlin, hoping never to return. And yet he does – after years in prison for killing his German boyfriend.

Taiwan’s Ghost Festival is taking place when Keith reappears, and in this novel the author stretches the limits of how we define ‘ghosts’. Are they things of the past? Other people? Or are they the memories that follow us and haunt us continuously?

Chen’s characters are vibrant and quirky, and his writing style is consistently precise and sharp; Taiwanese cultural issues are framed in enlightening fashion. Certain descriptions and concepts, you imagine, would have read more elegantly in the original Chinese, with no direct equivalent phrase for translator Darryl Sterk to employ, but Sterk’s use of naming conventions is both useful and interesting in itself.

The closer we come to the crux of the family’s dysfunction, the more Ghost Town hurts: you might not relate to these characters’ situations, yet you’ll not help but see yourself in every one of them.