The Ghost Bride

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The Ghost Bride
368 pages; William Morrow
In Yangsze Choo's debut novel, studious, shy Li Lan, the last daughter of a fading businessman in colonial Malaysia pined quietly for Tian Bai, scion to the Lim family's trading empire. That is, until she is offered to the family's dead son, Lim Tian Ching, as a "ghost bride," a woman married to a dead man, a tradition thought to appease vengeful spirits. After a terrifying visitation from her suitor's apparition, she drinks a medium’s potion, and her spirit escapes her body, beginning a long, strange journey through the netherworld for this now quite literal ghost bride. What will she find in this dreamworld of ox-headed demons, living-shadow puppets and guardian dragon spirits? Even stranger, what will she learn in the world of the living about Tian Bai, Lim Tian Ching's mysterious death and her long-departed, beloved mother? The Ghost Bride begins as a historical novel but takes an unexpected turn into a fantastical, ghost-and-murder mystery. What makes all this work is the sumptuous world of Chinese émigré culture and the love story that flows under it all—the kind so full of longing, the pages practically sigh as you turn each one.
— Fritz Brantley