Hong Kong, 1995. Life is surreal, swift, and out of control, as the city races toward the inevitable moment, the "hand-over" to China in 1997. Here are lives and loves in a changing world, chronicled by one of Hong Kong's leading novelists. With the publication of her third book, Hong Kong Rose, Xu Xi ranks as the foremost English-language writer to capture the reality of contemporary Hong Kong in fiction. In The Unwalled City her quiet, plainspoken prose ably evokes the tenor of life during those historical years. Resisting the urge to exorcize or "orientalize" the plot, characters or place, Xu Xi has crafted a memorable tale of enduring power.

The time is 1995. Life is surreal, swift, out of control as Hong Kong rushes towards that inevitable moment, the "handover" to China in 1997. Here are four lives in a changing world, in a city that is global, contemporary, and very much "home" to Chinese and Americans alike. THE UNWALLED CITY conjures an extraordinary feeling of place in a book that one reviewer says is filled with "believable characters that are fully human in their inner contradictions and complexity" and another calls "truly a novel of Hong Kong." Like the city itself, each of these native, and accidental, Hong Kong "yan" must leave behind the memory of what was in order to accept that which inevitably will be.