A Blissful Moment of Nothingness

It's a moment everyone dreads: that moment before death. But what if it's just an ordinary moment when nothing happens? What if it's no different from any other moment in life, when a dying person can't even tell what's coming? That moment could attract no emotional upheaval at all.

A Blissful Moment of Nothingness is a story about the past and the future. Everyone has a past, but Margaret Young is not someone who dwells on history, whether it's personal or that of a place. She's someone who'd rather live in the present.

Raised in Hong Kong, Margaret is forced by circumstances to revisit the past to make sense of her present. By recounting major events in her life, she comes to better understand herself and the people around her. She also comes to terms with the invisible power that is larger than life: the something that decides her fate and that of the people she loves.

Margaret sympathises with the young people in Hong Kong who are becoming disillusioned with life. They want to be in control of their destiny beyond 2047, when the city's "one country, two systems" status expires. What is Margaret's future during this political turmoil, and what is in store for the people in Hong Kong?

(About the Author)

After publishing two novels, Mother's Tongue: A Story of Forgiving and Forgetting (2013), and Who's that Ant? Whose Dead End? (2016), Susanna Ho continues to write stories about how politics influences ordinary people's lives. Drawing inspirations from her experiences in Hong Kong, Canada, and China, she wrote A Blissful Moment of Nothingness, giving particular importance to time and place. She became a full-time writer in 2020 and now lives in Tasmania.