The Man with the Compound Eyes

Praise

“Brilliant. . . . A haunting and evocative tale, beautifully told.” —Hugh Howey, author of Wool

“We haven’t read anything like this novel. Ever. South America gave us magical realism—what is Taiwan giving us? A new way of telling our new reality, beautiful, entertaining, frightening, preposterous, true. . . . Wu Ming-Yi treats human vulnerability and the world’s vulnerability with fearless tenderness.” —Ursula K. Le Guin

“A striking book. . . . It is science fiction . . . in the way that the best Margaret Atwood books are science fiction. . . .  I couldn’t put it down.” —Jason Sheehan, NPR

“Lyrical, haunting. . . . A heady mix of science fiction, fantasy, environmental fable and magical realism, the author had to create a genre entirely new for this singular, captivating book.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Astonishing. . . . A wonderful novel.” —The Independent (London)

“An earnest, politically conscious novel, anchored in ecological concerns and Taiwanese identity. . . . Beyond the book’s ecological and scientific attributes, you can see a deft novelist’s hand at work.” —Tash Aw, The Guardian  (London)

“Imaginative and moving.” —Financial Times

“[Ming-Yi is] reminiscent of Haruki Murakami, twisting the dreamlike into the curiously credible.” —Times Literary Supplement  (London)

“Rich, dense and dripping with life. The book sings in the key of fable, but with the timbre of reality.” —Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Fictional Universe

“An entrancing, multi-faceted elegy. . . . [Ming-Yi writes with] a poet’s approach. . . . Full of painful, wonderful beauty.” —The Rumpus

“Beautifully written and beautifully translated. . . . [Ming-Yi] guides us to see the entirety of experience as bumping flotsam in an unending ocean of life colliding and making a mess of things or making something new. . . . Lyric, simple, soft, the story crests and recedes and comes back again.” —The Bloomington Sun-Current

“[Ming-Yi’s] rollercoaster of a story is about wilderness, wildness, wonderment, love. . . . [The Man with the Compound Eyes includes] perhaps the best writing to ever come out of a Taiwan novel.” —Taipei Times

“A gift. . . . Ming-Yi is a naturalist as well as a storyteller, and it is perhaps his greatest achievement that this novel creates a sense of solidarity not only between his human characters, but also between [the] humans and the animals and plants he describes with such fidelity.” —FullStop

“Offering a heady dose of realism, surrealism, and magic realism, with several shots of allegory, award-winning Chinese author Wu [Ming-Yi] offers a work for ‘literary fiction’ readers, but not in the snobbish sense. It’s really for any curious, intelligent reader.” —Library Journal (starred review)