$15
“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.
“Catherine Gammon’s kaleidoscopic and complex novel China Blueis 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—
“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
“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.
“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
CATHERINE GAMMON is a fiction writer and Soto Zen priest. Her novel Sorrow, published by Braddock Avenue Books in 2013, was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her novel Isabel Out of the Rain was published in 1991 by Mercury House, and her shorter fiction has appeared in literary journals for many years. Catherine served on the faculty of the Master of Fine Arts program of the University of Pittsburgh before leaving the university to begin formal Zen training. She has trained for twelve years in residence at San Francisco Zen Center, where in 2005 she was ordained a priest in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi by Tenshin Reb Anderson Roshi. Since serving as Shuso in 2010 at SFZC’s Green Dragon Temple/Green Gulch Farm, Catherine has given teachings in Zen and writing in the U.K., in Brooklyn, in Pittsburgh, in Massachusetts, and at Green Gulch Farm.
