“Writing is how we understand why we belong to the world in Matthew Wong Foreman's debut…Spanning from the eve of the 1997 Hong Kong handover to the Hong Kong protests, Sunset at Lion Rock captures the voices of a city whose rich history haunts its present--from days of glamour shaped by the lore of Bruce Lee and Leslie Cheung to the smoky snooker halls of Sham Shui Po. Multi-tonal and searching, this debut positions writing itself as ‘the language of salvation’. This is a book that I wish, growing up here in Hong Kong, I’d had with me.”
— Sheung-King 尚敬, author of Batshit Seven and You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked.
“Matthew Wong Foreman's Sunset at Lion Rock is a virtuosic, kaleidoscopic insider's tale of Hong Kong…It is also an account of family, of a boy raised by a matriarchy of heartbreaks, reckoning with one of the most raw and authentic coming-of-age experiences I have read in literature. This is a richly rewarding book I'd recommend to anyone seeking a contemporary voice from Hong Kong to better understand a city seemingly perpetually at the crossroads of history.”
— Aube Rey Lescure, author of River East, River West
“Matthew Wong Foreman’s debut novel is an ambitious, epistolary sprawl that chronicles, protests and scrambles what a ‘Hong Kong novel’ (assuming such a a thing really needs to exist) ought to be. Sunset at Lion Rock is a fabulous beast of a book…A notably rewarding read from an obvious talent.”
— Xu Xi 許素細, author of That Man in Our Lives, Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City, and Monkey in Residence and Other Speculations
“Lyrical, restrained and deeply felt, Sunset at Lion Rock explores identity and memory in the shadow of history. A striking debut of uncommon grace.”
— Emma Pei Yin, author of When Sleeping Women Wake
“With its stark and piercing prose, Matthew Wong Foreman’s debut novel rises far beyond the usual fare of a mixed-race memoir. It’s also a history of Hong Kong, and what it feels like to be a single family made and made bereft by the city’s changes. Foreman refuses to look away from the contradictions and pain of this family. The portrait he paints is complex, moving, and real.”
— Belinda Huijuan Tang, author of A Map for the Missing
“A novel so visceral and full-bodied that I half-expected the spine to bleed as I gripped its pages. Matthew Wong Foreman writes of Hong Kong like it's a beloved, troubled family member: with a real urgency and learned patience, with the kind of fierce love that curls into hate around the edges. This is a novel about alienation that left me feeling utterly human.”
— Connie Wang, author of Oh My Mother!: A Memoir in Nine Adventures
“Love and loss share the same root in Sunset at Lion Rock. The narrator's passionate, searching voice takes us through the tug-of-war of a biracial and multicultural Hong Kong native, as he navigates the pain of understanding family decisions alongside his home city's complex history, as well as finding resolution, acceptance, and peace.”
— Flora Qian, author of South of the Yangtze
“Wong Foreman’s Hong Kong is complexly nuanced, is existentially problematic, is much more real and multi-prismed than the English language can manage to imagine and construct…A flawed place, an ingenious place, a borrowed place, a tragic place, a magic place--an all too human, all too spirited-emporium of the past gasping through the present.”
— Jason S Polley, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University; author of Jason S Polley, Wing Kin Vinton Poon, and Lian-Hee Wee (eds). Cultural Conflict in Hong Kong: Angles on a Coherent Imaginary. Palgrave, 2018.
Out September 15th 2026