I’m querying for Filial Piety, a 93,000-word Chinese-flavoured mystery featuring a cynical Canadian photojournalist, his naïve newcomer neighbour, a missing American and pragmatic Asian criminals.
I’m blogging about the adventure in Author Seeks Publisher.
Back cover
Gabriel looks at the world through a viewfinder to capture lives and customs all over the globe. This time, his trip went terribly wrong. Instead of returning with a documentary, he is shipped back to Canada, having lost everything—his belongings, identity, mobility and sanity.
He knew he shouldn’t have stepped into the picture. Holed up in Ottawa, he is developing a painkiller habit and nursing self-destructive tendencies.
Zoé, his French neighbour, is his scapegoat and only distraction—new to Canada, she needs the instruction manual. When Gabriel is cornered and comes clean, she provides a fresh perspective and helps him fly back to Singapore, where the trouble started.
The background
In fiction, few plots currently play on cultural differences, unless the main topic is diversity or a specific travel experience. Yet, most of us live international lives—we eat ethnic food, go on holiday abroad, and have friends from different cultural backgrounds and relatives overseas.
French by birth, Canadian by choice and Chinese by love, I am a chameleon who connects with different cultures and bridges them. Filial Piety depicts where cultures intersect, celebrates our differences and resonates with us, multicultural people living in a multicultural world.
Beyond the cultural adventure, Filial Piety is a mystery exploring the world of missing persons, the moral implications of two Chinese customs, potentially transformative decisions that become inconsequential over time and seemingly mundane events that shape our destiny.
There are no cops, no shrinks, no experts, and no shortcuts— Filial Piety focuses on real people, beautifully flawed and awfully illogical, the mistakes we make and the value of different perspectives.