I had the great fortune of being raised by my grandparents. They let me go to kindergarten late just because I was sleepy, and they were always the first to arrive for pickup. I would bike alongside them on their daily walks and act as their translator at their favourite fast-food restaurants. At night my grandmother read me stories—Chinese classics—but sometimes she would tell me about the pencil company my family ran back in Taiwan.
A budding writer, I thought the idea of a company that made pencils impossibly romantic.
When I was eight years old, my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Her decline was slow and cruel, over the course of a decade. She could still talk, but her stories turned repetitive, until they turned into babbling, then silence. In rare moments of clarity, she would panic about whether the pencil company could survive, reliving a history I knew little about.
By the time I was old enough to wonder about her past, her memory of it was gone. I hardly knew anything about the China she had grown up in and why she left. It took me years to understand how many millions were like her, fleeing multiple wars in Shanghai for Taiwan and eventually making their way to the United States.
After my grandparents passed away, I took an interest in software. I helped build a website where people of the Taiwanese diaspora could share their stories. Even in technology, my interests were circling around stories and how they’re passed on.
“It is a joy to imagine this book travelling the world.”
All of this made its way into The Phoenix Pencil Company, a novel about a woman who flees Shanghai and Taiwan while crafting pencils, and her granddaughter who is desperate to understand her family’s history before her grandmother’s memory fades. I’ll never know my grandmother’s real story, but in a way, this allowed me the freedom to fictionalise, turn historical reality into fantasy, and to add magic to the pencils she was making, a magic that parallels the best and worst of what I’ve seen working in tech. But at its core, it is a book about a granddaughter who loves her grandmother very much, and all the magic that can come from that deep a bond. It is a joy to imagine this book travelling the world, maybe doing for readers what my grandmother did for me—sharing the stories and wonders of a long-lost pencil company.
— Allison King
About the book
9780008700843, HB, £16.99
31 Jul 2025
Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-confessed recluse, she finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and she worries about them – especially her grandmother Yun whose memory has begun to fade.
Monica has become intent on tracking down her grandmother Yun’s long-lost cousin, Meng, before it’s too late. In her search, Monica connects with a young woman archivist who presents her with a single pencil that holds a clue to a hidden family history. Through this discovery Monica comes to learn of her grandmother’s years in Shanghai, working at the Phoenix Pencil Company.
As WWII raged outside their door, Yun and Meng came into a power unique to the women in their family: the ability to reclaim stories from the pencils they were written with. But when government officials uncovered their secret ability, they were both forced into a life of espionage, betraying other people’s stories to survive. These shocking revelations set Monica on a path that will change all their lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.
