A hoarding Chinese grandmother fills her home with objects, unable to distinguish between the value of things. Meanwhile, her Asian-Australian grandson travels to China for the first time, wary of the revelations that the trip might offer, as he tries to make sense of his own Chinese and Anglo-Australian background. In Guangzhou, Kaiping, Shanghai, and Beijing, amidst the incessant construction and consumption of twenty-first-century China, a shadowy heritage reveals and withholds itself, while the suburbs he knows from back home are threaded into the cities he visits, forming an intricately braided Chinese-Australian inheritance. 

Lachlan Brown grew up in Macquarie Fields in South West Sydney. His first collection, Limited Cities (Giramondo, 2012), was commended for the Mary Gilmore Award. His poems have been shortlisted and highly commended for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Canberra Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and the Blake Poetry Prize. He teaches literature at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga.