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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

THE STOLEN BICYCLE

Wu Ming-Yi

The long-awaited new novel by the author THE MAN WITH THE COMPOUND EYES. Instant No.1 bestseller with over 10,000 copies sold.
“However I tell the story I want to tell, bicycles have to play important roles. Especially stolen bicycles. ‘“Iron horses” have influenced the fate of our entire family,' my mother used to say. I would describe my mother as a historical materialist: to her, there are no Great Men, no heroes, no bombing of Pearl Harbor. All she remembers is seemingly trivial, but to her fateful, matters like bicycles going missing. For her fate is an article of faith, and life is what happens to you, not what you do.”

Cheng, a novelist, once wrote a book about his father's childhood and his disappeared twenty years ago. One day he receives a reader's email asking whether his father's bicycle disappeared as well. Perplexed and amused, Cheng decides to track down the bicycle, which was stolen years ago. The journey takes him to a scavenger's treasure trove, the mountain home of an aboriginal photographer, deep into the secret world of antique bicycle collectors, and ultimately to his own heart. The result is an intimate portrait of a Taiwanese family, a history of the bicycle industry, and a collage of magical, heart-wrenching stories from various characters in the novel.
Told in the same warm and clear voice that made The Man with the Compound Eyes such a literary favourite, Wu Ming-Yi's new novel combines historical fiction and his unique brand of magical realism to create a stunning work of art.

Wu Ming-Yi (b.1971) is a writer, artist, professor, and environmental activist. Widely considered the leading writer of his generation, he has won the China Times Open Book Award five times and his works have been translated into nine languages. He teaches literature at National Dong Hwa University.
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Published 2023-05-11 by Rye Field

Comments

Gimm-Young

"Like W.G. Sebald, to whom he has been compared, Wu deploys fragments of memory, war diaries, memoir and voice recordings to fashion his ambitious, meditative narrative." "It is only in the final chapters that the enigmatic threads of this novel come together, like pieces of an unfamiliar jigsaw, and the power and scope of this extraordinary work hit home... Wu uses layer upon layer of quotidian detail, historical fact and human memory to fashion a vast vision of the history of not just Taiwan, but of the entire era." "A rare accounting of the costs of war and post-war industrialisation on both humans and the natural world"

International Hot Book Properties Pick

‘An entrancing, multi-faceted elegy [Ming-Yi writes with] a poet's approach Full of painful, wonderful beauty.

Chin Lit

Libri

Phanbook

Text Publishing

‘The novel, inspired by his love for bicycles and Taiwanese history, brings readers back to a simpler time when life moved more slowly and people spent more time face-to-face with friends and neighbors. Riding a bike allowed people to appreciate and digest the details of the world around them.'

Bungeishunju

Enaudi

‘A work of astonishing energy, in which Wu beautifully touches on loss, life and death, fate and destiny, establishing emotional connections between memory and objects, and between the natural world and war a novel that provides comfort and reconciliation from a wounded past.'