Frontier

"Like an abstract painting that reveals new colors and shapes the longer you look at it, Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping’s translation of Can Xue’s Frontier is more experience than narrative, with characters and elements of setting recurring in quiet, moving combination. Haunted by Snow Mountain and the poplar grove and hunting a mysterious tropical garden that might live inside a small boy named Roy, the citizens of Pebble Town try to understand their neighbors – and end up more distant from themselves. Reading it is like trying to solve a mystery in a dream; talking about it is an attempt to describe a forest floor stirring at the cusp of winter."