White Ghost Girls

By Alice Greenway

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction
A Radio 4 Book at Bedtime

Two sisters grow together and apart into their emerging selves. Frankie pulses with curiosity and risk; Kate is watchful, all eyes and ears. Immersed in the heat and colours of Hong Kong in the 1960s, theirs is a world of fishermen and insurgents, temple gods and ghosts, of blinding light and dark, dark waters.

As Frankie's behaviour becomes more and more outrageous in her defiant attempt to win her parents' attention, Kate retreats into a quiet desperation, unable to act to save the soul for whom she would sacrifice everything - Frankie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Release date: May 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781848877788

Alice Greenway

Alice Greenway is an American who grew up in Hong Kong. As the daughter of a foreign correspondent she also lived in Bangkok, Jerusalem and the United States. She later returned to Hong Kong and now lives in Scotland with her family. White Ghost Girls is her first novel, published in 2006.

Reviews for White Ghost Girls

[aahlvers_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

White Ghost Girls by Alice Greenaway is a haunting story about two sisters growing up in Hong Kong. This is another book that I am still thinking about. The younger sister is the narrator and so we see the older sister's actions through a bit of a filter. It has me thinking about the details that were left out that would explain why the older sister acted the way she did. In addition, this author has a poetic way with words. Every once in a while I would stop and reread a sentence or paragraph not for content but because of the way the words flowed on the page.

[lyzadanger · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

 Nostalgia. Before you fall into the rhythm of wistful recollection, you really have to give your readers something to reference back to as a touchstone. Starting with the dolorousness, insisting that the foreshadowed heartbreak is already palpable—that feels artificial. The protagonist's projected nostalgia onto her father's beloved place—Saigon during the Vietnam War, which she has never seen in the way that I have never seen the villages outside of Hong Kong—at least parallels this weird obsession-for-something-unseen. Sweaty and threatening female adolescence. Strong autobiographical bent.More a series of vignettes than a novel.