An Idea About My Dead Uncle

A young, mixed-race composer, raised without meaningful connections to his Chinese heritage and struggling with identity issues, travels to China in search of his long-missing uncle, an uncle who vanished in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. An Idea About My Dead Uncle--winner of the inaugural Guernica Prize for the best unpublished novel manuscript--is about the identities we choose and the ones that are imposed on us. It is about being on the outside looking in. It is about dealing with pain through the artistic process. It is about delusion and healing. It is about the power of narrative. According to Gabriella Goliger, winner of the 2011 City of Ottawa Literary Award for Fiction for her novel Girl Unwrapped and a juror for the Guernica Literary Prize: A witty, sharp-edged, finely-crafted story about a young man struggling with identity issues, which causes relationship disasters and a quest for his long lost uncle in China. The introspective but straightforward narrative eventually plunges into the surreal, mirroring the madness that can result from an uncompromising search for self.