English Sample Available   "Sleepless Mansion draws on many elements from detective fiction—a mysterious letter from afar, photographs still waiting to be developed, a riddle of parentage on the verge of being solved. Its unreliable threads of narration, meanwhile, arrange themselves into something like an Escherian space of paradox and endless loops. And yet I prefer to read it, above all, as a story of searching for one's roots." — Tse Hiu-hung, novelist and Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University   Set in the near future of 2047, Sleepless Mansion opens as Chiu O, a solitary man long settled in the UK, receives an email signed only “J.” The message is enough to draw him back: from London to Hong Kong, and to the house he once abandoned without a word.   More than three decades earlier, during one fateful summer, a young Chiu O first entered Sleepless Mansion. Beneath its osmanthus tree, he forged an inseparable bond with the siblings Julian and Julia, and came to know Julian’s childhood friend, Lee Wai-yuet. In and around the mansion, and amid the disputed land of the surrounding walled village, the four navigated the uncertainties of adolescence, their friendship charged with feelings none of them could fully name. As Chiu O retraces his journey home, the tragedy of that summer and the emotions they left unresolved gradually rise to the surface.   Sleepless Mansion has meant something different to each of its inhabitants: a childhood playground, the setting of a first love, an old man’s private garden, and  an adult battleground. With time, the villagers’ once-intimate ties begin to curdle, until affection, betrayal, resentment, and regret become impossible to separate. Even as the children continue to stand guard over their dreams, bulldozers are already waiting in the hills beyond.   A richly layered allegory of Hong Kong and its unsettled identity, Sleepless Mansion moves across time and between multiple perspectives to dismantle the familiar binaries of nation and other, belonging and exile, departure and return. The mansion becomes at once a home to which no one can truly return, a site that its inhabitants desperately wish to escape yet remain powerless to resist, and a vessel containing Hong Kong’s social hierarchies, contested history, and uncertain future. The city’s distinctive system of indigenous land rights takes on an almost spectral presence, haunting the house and those bound to it.