“A collection of heartbreaks and awakenings set to lightning.” —Junot Díaz, author, This Is How You Lose Her

A siren call to Hong Kong’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow, envisioned by one of the city’s most prescient and unapologetic writers.

One of Hong Kong’s leading English writers, Xu Xi investigates and invigorates the transnational, transcultural, and translingual dimensions of her beloved city in these 22 stories covering the 1960s to the present day. Written against the backdrop of tremendous political change—from Hong Kong’s transformation from a British colony to a Chinese Special Administrative Region in 1997 to the political turmoil of the 2014 Occupy Hong Kong protests and the 2019 Polytechnic University occupation—Xu’s stories capture the intimate realities of lives led and choices made under the shadow of a city that looms large in our imagination.

A cast of idiosyncratic local and expatriate characters navigates what it means to love, leave, and return again and again to their home city: a young girl obsesses over an orange-haired lady from Chung King Mansion; a massage therapist practices English with a client; a woman appeals to reinstate her American work visa or face deportation; a man reluctantly attends his high school's thirty-fifth reunion dinner; and monkeys are appointed academic residency at the local university.

Horizon Hong Kong demonstrates the power and range of Xu Xi’s oeuvre, its stories Hong Kong’s and also the world’s.

Format: Trade Paperback

Author: Xi, Xu

Publisher: Gaudy Boy

Pub Date: July 1, 2026

Category: Fiction / Literary Fiction

ISBN: 9781958652251

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Short Stories