A Perfect Day to Put Your Head in the Oven

MULTIPLE INTERNATIONAL AWARDS WINNER
Translated by Lin King, translator of TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE

'A gorgeous, surprising and deeply intelligent book. I read it rapt and awestruck' Claire Vaye Watkins

A genre-defying novel from a rare new international voice for fans of Lucia Berlin, Elena Ferrante and Han Kang as a young woman revisits her youth to discover all was not as it seemed.

Faced with a blank page, Tan’s attempt to come up with her first novel, A Clueless Man Shakes His Thump-Thumping Head, is faltering. She embarks instead on her memoir. Verifying her own memories against her parents’ and old classmates’, they are surprised to hear from her after all these years. ‘Are you dying?’ they ask.

Tan is keen to explore which of her childhood recollections are true: the dinner table guessing game that disclosed her parents were on the brink of divorce; a kissing ritual among friends; her life-affirming dream triggered by a piece of spinach at the bottom of a sink. Weaving Tan’s real-time research with the memoir itself, Lee Chia-Ying reveals the universal hilarity and horror of youth.

A Perfect Day is a dynamic tale of childhood loneliness, innocence lost, and of first encounters with disappointment and betrayal. Inspiring the reader to recall their own origin story, it highlights with razor-sharp wit the tensions between our reality and other people's, and all the unexpected ways in which memory tricks and shapes our lives.
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Readers love A PERFECT DAY TO PUT YOUR HEAD IN THE OVEN

***** ‘Reading this made me fly back to my own past’
***** ‘I enjoyed its tenderness. Like the protagonist at the end, I felt warmth float into my eyes’
***** ‘Interesting and philosophical. This cleverly considers the differences between fiction and reality’
***** ‘A book to read over and over’
***** ‘This is not only a process of "memory reconstruction," but also a dialectic of "fiction vs. reality"’
***** ‘Its words are like a whirlpool, pulling me back to my teenage years’