A discomforting, poetic novel of what is and is not, from an author who can hold what is lost on every page.
Who is China Blue? In the early 1980s, teenaged Tess runs away from home to New York City after a fortune-teller dredges up a memory she’d dismissed as a forgotten dream. Tess’s Mama struggles to understand the reason for her disappearance as other characters battle with the consequences of US wars in Central America, the mistakes of the surveillance state, as well as with alcoholism and what “truth” means to them. Winner of the Bridge Eight Press Fiction Prize, Catherine Gammon’s musical novel is rich with fully-formed characters, generous with real feeling, and intentional with its prose.
Reviews & Interviews
“When I first wrote “Night Vision,” the opening chapter of China Blue—something like forty years ago now—I imagined I was retelling the Greek story of Psyche and Eros … ”
Readings & Events
Check out Catherine Gammon in conversation with Toi Derricotte, Lynn Emanuel, and William Lychack.
About the Author
Advance Praise for China Blue
“Catherine Gammon’s kaleidoscopic and complex novel China Blue is both gorgeously and fluidly written and immovably fixed by the boundaries of human suffering. Taking place in the shadow of the Vietnam War and during the American destabilization of El Salvador, China Blue assembles its montage from the jagged lives of women and men entrapped by addiction, poverty, and sexual obsession. Gritty, sorrowful, clear-eyed, and vivid, China Blue is a powerful book, and one of uncompromising originality and integrity.”
Lynn Emanuel, author of The Nerve of It, Noose and Hook, and Then, Suddenly—
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“Catherine Gammon innovates a stark and filmic fiction in her remarkable China Blue. Read this unnerving and haunting book! A shape-shifting narrative of intersecting and cascading voices and warped secrets. Characters abuse, comfort, appear, and disappear in the cold. “My innocence is my wickedness. I go dancing on the graves.” “I. He. You … Every voice the mind.” A hallucinatory ride through Joycean streams of consciousness that catapult a child-woman anti-heroine into a girl-child’s sex-abused desire. Unable-to-love floundering men come and go from her unable-to-love mother’s bed and table. Small town winter-beach denizens, homeless vodka-warmed escapees, nowhere-to-go-but-anywhere runaways. A bus ride away, New York City acquires these unraveled threads. A once-upon child who would have controlled if only she had mastered magic, or known what was real in the invisible. Her “I will not pity you” to an abuser. Her vagrant mother, their home like sand. And maybe a return. A discomforting, poetic novel of what is and is not, from an author who can hold what is lost on every page.”
Margo Berdeshevsky, author of Before the Drought and Beautiful Soon Enough
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“China Blue’s characters drift away, are lost, and return as ghosts of themselves, but while the facts of their stories may sometimes seem phantasmatic, the hurt here is harrowing and unquestionable. If you’re looking for a novel that is unsparing in its depiction of dysfunction and abuse but still elegant and empathetic, you’ve found it. ”
Gabriel Blackwell, author of CORRECTION and Madeleine E.
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“A haunted dream of a book—by turns poetry, philosophy, love story, always beautiful, enigmatic, strange—China Blue is a fiery declaration of all that is inexpressible about desire and loss and the need to find a home in a world in which even the most solid and real of things feel often less than completely solid or real. “The sky is paper. The wind is up. The trees are rasping.” And Catherine Gammon brings this world to life like a demon.”
William Lychack, author of Cargill Falls and The Wasp Eater
For Booksellers
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