Taiwanese author Kevin Chen 陳思宏 began his artistic career as a cinema actor, starring in the Taiwanese and German films Ghosted, Kung Bao Huhn, and Global Player. Now based in Germany, he is a staff writer for Performing Arts Reviews magazine. He’s published several novels and short story collections, including Attitude, Flowers from Fingernails, Ghosts by Torchlight, the essay collection Rebellious Berlin, Three Ways to Get Rid of Allergies and other titles.

One of Kevin’s award-winning bestseller novels Ghost Town has been translated into English and released in the US on October 25th, 2022. Having finished his successful author tour in NYC and Washington DC in October, 2022, Kevin will also take part in the 2023 Pen World Voices Festival.

Sharp Objects meets Flannery O’Connor in Garcia Marquez’s Macondo – or rather its Taiwanese equivalent – in this bestselling literary tour-de-force.

GHOST TOWN is a stunning novel about a small town in the Taiwan countryside and a family haunted by their own ghosts. Keith Chen, the second son of a traditional Taiwanese family of seven, runs away from the oppression of his village to Berlin in the hope of finding acceptance as a young gay man.

The novel begins a decade later, when Chen has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. He is about to return to his family’s village, a poor and desolate place. With his parents gone, his sisters married, mad, or dead, there is nothing left for him there. As the story unfurls, we learn what tore this family apart and, more importantly, the truth behind the murder of Chen’s boyfriend. Told in a myriad of voices, both living and dead, and moving through time with deceptive ease, the novel weaves a mesmerizing web of family secrets and countryside superstitions, the search for identity and clash of cultures.