A Chinese Affair

Sixteen exquisite stories exploring recent Chinese migration to Australia and elsewhere, exploring intergenerational and interracial relationships, the search for meaning, and the effects of isolation and the inability to express oneself in a second language.

Best-selling author, Debra Adelaide, says Isabelle Li's prose is powerful, exquisite and finely tuned, and each story draws us deeper into the complex emotional and cultural dilemmas of characters who are solitary, sensitive, perceptive and powerless, sometimes all at once.

'What does it take to master a second language, to be so skilled in that language that you're published in it? Chinese/Australian writer and translator Isabelle Li reminds us that learning to love an adopted language does not come without its struggles.' ABC Radio National

"Moody and slow-burning with moments of startling revelation… Li crafts some exquisite, sometimes shocking scenes (often of cruelty or loss), then allows dramatic tension to sag in-between with long passages of meandering description." —The Saturday Paper

Reviewed here in the Sydney Morning Herald