Daydreamers - by Alvin Lu (Paperback)

About the Book

When a son uncovers a foreign manuscript among his father's last belongings, he begins to translate what appears to be a novel, left unfinished--one that may also be a confession, a revenge-fantasy, or a record of a life he never knew. Daydreamers "translates" into a layered story of murder, migration, and artistic rivalry across California and Taiwan, blurring the lines between fact, fiction, and familial memory.

Book Synopsis

A fragmented manuscript left unfinished, a voice inherited by time, a ghost lingering in the margins--Daydreamers is what remains when fiction forgets its fiction and when the story you're translating becomes your own.

Upon the discovery of an unfinished manuscript left behind by his late father, a son's act of literary translation quickly descends into a ghost story of family rumors, art, and the history we inherit, whether we want them or not. As the son translates the mysterious text, what emerges is a narrative haunted by betrayal, artistic rivalry, and a murder in California's Chinese literary underground--one that was never solved but perhaps was fictionalized.

Cycling between San Francisco, Los Angeles, China, and Taiwan, the novel unfolds across generations of Chinese immigrants and diaspora artists, linked by tenuous friendships, publishing feuds, and the obscure threads of an act of violence. At the center: a spectral woman named Lena Wu, the object of literary fixation, political allegory, and real-life scandal.

Was the manuscript meant as a novel or a confession? Was the story's central figure--Lena Wu--a real person or an idea and persona passed between generations of writers, each shaping her into their own myth? And what is the narrator's responsibility when his father's version of events begins to implicate those still living?

Told through letters, interviews, travelogues, and unclaimed fragments, Daydreamers moves through foggy cities, cluttered studios, desert highways, and vanished publishing circles--where stories are currency and silence is survival. Lu constructs a novel that is both noir and anti-noir, both memoir and anti-memoir--a mystery that resists solving, and a translation that becomes its own original work.

Review Quotes

"Daydreamers kind of sinks in slowly. Then it becomes absorbing in a way that doesn't let up. It slowed me down from the rattle of the outside world. I was grateful for this. Most striking are its observations and textures of San Francisco: beautiful."

--Stacey Levine, author of Mice 1961, finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

"Daydreamers presents as a series of stories told through filters of translation, raising questions of authorship and origins, offering different textures of kinds of narratives, from the personal memoir to the reportorial. Mixing the early years of the cultural revolution with present day California, this is a mesmerizing mapping of a mystery of the disappeared, heirs and survivors with elusive motives, and a story of immigration, brilliantly inflected with undercurrents both noir and comic."
--Susan Daitch, author of Siege of Comedians

"Daydreamers promises another journey with Alvin Lu, who has an extraordinary capacity to build worlds that unseat order and genre simultaneously. I look forward to being unseated, blurred, and bewildered by this one."

--Alina Stefanescu, author of My Heresies and On the Seawall

About the Author

Alvin Lu is a native San Franciscan and author of a previous novel, The Hell Screens.