Read this marvellous collection by Xu Xi, genre-defying essays and fiction that are truly writing without borders. Xu Xi writes from the perspective of her global life. Her literary references range across Hesiod and Ding Ling and Jonathan Swift. The elegance of her language is breath-taking. Fallen books are "an avalanche of words" and memory is "the crookedest path." But beyond her inventiveness (I love the "end note") and erudition, Xu Xi's writing takes us into heartrending and complex longing for the spaces created by borders, especially for those we love and for the city in which her cosmopolitan being was nurtured, Hong Kong. I couldn't put this book down, and when I was finished I started to read it again.

Kim Echlin, Canadian novelist, Toronto Book Award winner. author of Speak Silence, Under the Visible Life, The Disappeared etc.

To know Hong Kong-or even to be curious about the city and its people-is to love Xu Xi's work. Monkey in Residence is a brilliant blend of fact and fiction that captures the conundrum that is modern Hong Kong: once British, now Chinese, still seeking its own identity and freedom. The diverse pieces in this collection-some dark, some funny, some poignant-paint a portrait of a writer who has had a long love affair with a city, despite its imperfections, and knows she will never quite be able to leave it behind. Xu Xi's tantalizing language, sprinkled with Chinese, is an absolute delight to read.

Clifford Garstang, author of What the Zhang Boys Know and The Shaman of Turtle Valley

Illuminating and moving, monkey in residence & other speculations offers a frank discussion of language, people, and culture from a woman without borders living among and across nations. Uniting family, belonging, travel, and the quest for transnational identity, this stunning hybrid collection reveals how people are shaped by the environments they inhabit. The insight of Xu Xi's writing is astounding. In search of the lost, she unravels the past to unveil the layered now.

-Aimee Parkison, Suburban Death Project and Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman