For 11-year-old Emma-Lee, the sound of Hong Kong in the summer of 1995 is Cantopop. The Cantopop stars she idolises are everywhere – their images are on every billboard and their music spills from shop speakers onto the streets. When she and her family move to England later that year, Emma-Lee’s love of Cantopop will be pushed underground – the sound and symbol of her secret childhood identity.

My Cantopop Nights is the story of how Emma-Lee found herself in a Hong Kong bar twenty years later, listening to a Cantopop song and realising that this music was her inheritance. It’s about suffering an identity crisis just as the city’s post-colonial tensions erupt into protests. It’s a story of uncanny coincidences, magical thinking and a quest to reconcile the different sides of her heritage: Hong Konger and British, Cantopop and indie.

It’s a story of falling in love with a city, its people and its music, while trying to find your own place to belong.

Captures that era of Hong Kong music with such warmth and clarity . . . Transcendent and transportive. – Angela Hui

A wondrous thing: fresh, evocative, self-aware, fantastically light of touch and wholly original. – Sarah Howe

An author of exceptional vision . . . for anyone seeking to understand how complicated, tender histories unfurl in our present – and how art emerges to help us through. – Jessica J. Lee

Prepare to meet your new favourite playlist. – Dan Schreiber