STEER TOWARD ROCK by Fae Ng

We've just agreed with Donadio & Olsen in New York to handle the UK rights for Fae Myenne Ng's new novel, STEER TOWARD ROCK.

I think this is a rather extraordinary novel and it's being published by Hyperion in the US in the Spring of 2008.

Ng's previous novel Bone was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize and was influential in netting Fae the American Academy Rome Prize; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; MacDowell Colony Residency.

The book tells the story of two people - Jack Szeto & Joice Qwan:

Jack Szeto is the only bachelor butcher in San Francisco's Chinatown, the man who serves the grass widows (women whose husbands work the farmlands in the Central Valley, only returning home occasionally) more than just their weekly order of lamb or beef. As he says, "I was the Lord of the Peach Blossoms and all asked to be my sweetheart, but I swept them away like sawdust when I met Joice."

Joice Qwan is a bamboo woman, a Chinese-American born in San Francisco. Her mother is the funeral lady"(she cleans corpses) tainting both women within the community. Jack falls in love with Joice instantly. But Joice has demons, worse than being the funeral lady's daughter, and when she gets pregnant Jack faces a decision that jeopardizes everything he thinks he wants.

In flowing and beautiful prose, Fae Myenne Ng tells this story of first- and second-generation Chinese Americans with compassion and brutal honesty. Fifteen years after her ecstatically received début, she returns with a novel that is absolutely worth the wait.

Please contact: adrian@raftpr.com if you'd like to read the manuscript.