Southern Cross the Dog

Bill Cheng Press Reviews

'An incredibly daring and powerful debut. Not only does Bill Cheng set the language on fire in Southern Cross the Dog, but he creates a whole new territory of story-telling. One of the great literary enterprises is the ability to understand 'otherness,' and Cheng proves masterful in his ability to dwell in another era and place, while still remaining rooted in the landscape of the human heart. Cheng, almost literally, writes out of his skin'
Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

'Fantastic and beautifully written, Southern Cross the Dog is an epic and bluesy throwdown in the Southern tradition.'
Nathan Englander, author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne

'Frank Cheng rises head and shoulders above the crowd by virtue of one very convincing fact: throughout Southern Cross the Dog the reader never has any idea what will happen next. Chatham's journey ... is as rollicking as the blues that one of its central protagonists, Eli, plays on his beat-up harmonium. It's a book full of flashes of thrilling darkness, surprising acts of kindness from bad people, and a social injustice that really crawls under your skin and angrily pulsates long after the novel is done. The overall effect is something like listening to a great lost country song, watching a Depression-era version of Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke documentary and reading the punchiest Cormac McCarthy novel there ever was, all at the same time.'

Tom Cox, Observer

'Cheng jumps between times and place with superb power and assurance, driving his epic story up to the second world war. His writing fizzes with invention; he characters jump right off the page.'

The Times

'This is an assured debut novel ... Robert's journey into manhood is a tour de force of descriptive power, a poetic invocation of the blues ... there are some unforgettable set pieces and the writing is sublime throughout.'

Mail on Sunday

'Fraught with poverty, pain and inhumanity, this tale of a young boy's passage from childhood to manhood in a harsh, segregated world is a Delta blues song in book form that has earned Cheng comparisons with the US novelist Cormac McCarthy. Metro For the first few pages of Bill Cheng's debut Southern Cross the Dog, you may feel disoriented. Good. That's the author's intention. You are not in the world of realist fiction, a landscape peopled with recognisable characters who are about to embark upon a familiar story. You are in the world of language and music... It is southern gothic without a break, because Robert hardly gets a day off from his struggle ...this is, after all, the deep south, in both history and literature the home of an unstable mix of trauma, dram and melodrama... Southern Cross the Dog is an experiment in submerging the reader in the rhythms and language of a period of US history and literature that has disappeared. He has made his book out of fascination and research. It is haunting and unrelenting.'

Guardian

'Bill Cheng offers a grand and precious novel that splendidly extends our appreciation for an endlessly complex place in our American world, a place of colorful and unforgettable characters and landscapes both threatening and inviting. His work is lush and so very often poetic. Southern Cross the Dog has large and small echoes of masterful works, but we should not make any mistake-Cheng has carved out his own creative and accomplished path. His novel is a welcome and necessary addition to a society where good and compelling writing and stories are not as easy to find as some may think.'
Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World and All Aunt Hagar's Children

'Vividly evokes the backwoods balefulness and enchantment of such contesting cinematic variation on the genre as The Night of the Hunter and Beast of the Southern Wild.' Sunday Times