A History in Shanghai

Breno Silva has just attended the Anonymous Writers Congress in Kuala Lumpur and is on his way back to São Paulo when a bomb scare on his Malaysia Airlines flight forces him to spend a night in Shanghai. Fascinated by the Chinese language - he is after all a ghost writer by trade and a man who lives by language - he spends the night watching television, trying to pick out words. In charting Breno's life we enter a storytelling labyrinth, as his myth-making, love-making and essays into another culture become mired in the world where celebrities make reputations and fortunes from the writing of others, and where the reader is not sure what language, or what reality, is being offered.