Larissa was born in La Jolla, California and grew up in St. Mitchell Award, the bpNichol Chapbook Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism. A recipient of the Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers' Award, she has been a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Tiptree Award, the Sunburst Award, the City of Calgary W.O.

Larissa Lai has authored three novels, The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl and When Fox Is a Thousand two poetry collections, sybil unrest (with Rita Wong) and Automaton Biographies a chapbook, Eggs in the Basement and a critical book, Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s. Rich with ancient Chinese mythology and cultural lore, this remarkable novel is about gender, love, honour, intrigue, and fighting against oppression. Could Miranda be infected by the Dreaming Disease that makes the past leak into the present?įramed by a playful sense of magical realism, 'Salt Fish Girl' reveals a futuristic Pacific Northwest where corporations govern cities, factory workers are cybernetically engineered, middle-class labour is a video game, and those who haven't sold out to commerce and other ills must fight the evil powers intent on controlling everything. Miranda is haunted by traces of her mother's glamourous cabaret career, the strange smell of durian fruit that lingers about her, and odd tokens reminiscient of Nu Wa. Told in the beguiling voice of a narrator who is fish, snake, girl, and woman - all of whom must struggle against adversity for survival - the novel is set alternately in nineteenth-century China and in a futuristic Pacific Northwest.Īt turns whimsical and wry, 'Salt Fish Girl' intertwines the story of Nu Wa, the shape-shifter, and that of Miranda, a troubled young girl living in the walled city of Serendipity circa 2044. 'Salt Fish Girl' is the mesmerizing tale of an ageless female character who shifts shape and form through time and place.

Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai