by Yeng Pway Ngon Singapore, late 1980s. As women gain power and independence, what's an insecure guy to do? Lonely Face is the story of a man on the cusp of middle age, left behind by changing times. Fleeing his crumbling marriage on an overnight bus to Genting Highlands, he tries his luck at slot machines rather than the vagaries…
by Roger Pulvers Published originally in Australia by ABC Books and HarperCollins, and in Japanese translation by the major publishing house Shueisha, THE HONEY AND THE FIRES is a retelling of some of the most powerful stories from the Bible for our day and age. This new paperback edition contains a story that did not appear in the original publication: “The Story…
by Steven Sy As a second invasion by the Empire threatens the nomads of the Great Steppe, a new generation of leaders must mend the broken alliances of their fathers or face certain destruction. Vacant Steppes is a Mongolia-inspired epic fantasy novel about inheritance, family, and leadership in times of division and war. “A gripping tale of war, legacy and…
by Shih Chiung-Yu Haunted by memories of the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s, nationalist soldiers from all over mainland China are doomed to live out their days in exile in Taitung County, along the southeastern shore of the island of Taiwan. The three novellas in this collection tell stories of Chinese men who were forced to leave their…
by Roger Pulvers "LIV is a gripping mystery, of a present haunted by the past, but also a profoundly moral book, asking of the reader: what would you do? In this, LIV deserves comparison with novels as great as An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Reader by Bernhard Schlink." — David Peace, author of Tokyo Year Zero.…
2015 English Pen Translates Award; 2016 Financial Times / OppenheimerFunds Emerging Voices Awards (Longlisted). by Xu Xiaobin Yang Tianyi is a “leftover woman” and under pressure to find a husband. She is attractive and intelligent but knows little of the world, and finally makes a disastrous marriage to a man, Wang Lian. At the end of the 1980s, in Tiananmen…
by Roger Pulvers This fascinating fictional account of the life and times of Lafcadio Hearn probes the question: "What was the nature of this man, born wanderer, informant of the fiendish details of Japanese lore ... a man who chose to live his life 'in defiance of the season'?" Still considered by the Japanese to be the foreigner with the…
by Xu Xiaobin With her delightfully evocative prose, Xu Xiaobin presents us with a collection of stories crawling with fraught power dynamics, strange events, and unsettling images. Not only does she write about women, but the worlds around them, the fears that dog them, and the histories that haunt them. Xu’s entangled plots sneak up on the reader and make…
by Xu Xiaobin Translated from the Chinese by John Howard-Gibbon, Natascha Bruce, Nicky Harman and Alvin Leung ISBN: 978-1-911221-19-7 Publication date: 25 March 2019 Format: Paperback (Demy octavo) 216mm x 138mm Pages: 120 pp Cover illustration by Xu Xiaobin
by Randy Taguchi Riku Sato is in the fifth grade, when he moves from Utsunomiya to Fukushima to switch schools. Minamisoma, the town he arrives in, is virtually deserted--after the devastating earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 11, 2011, which struck the Tohoku region in Japan and triggered a nuclear meltdown, not a single soul is in sight; not in…
by Chang Ying-Tai WINNER OF THE 2015 LENNOX ROBINSON LITERARY AWARD Selected by BookTrust for the "Books we like: June 2015" (age 12+). A reclusive young boy stumbles upon his father’s diary. Filled with drawings, photos and anecdotes, the diary reveals an alpine world that his father once inhabited as a child: where tribes were fashioned by tree spirits; animals could be spoken to;…
by Ying-Tai Chang As Flowers Bloom and Wither tells a bold and stirring story with great sensitivity. The protagonist, whose true identity was enshrouded in an enormous plot, must brave the thorns of history in order to unravel the threads of this enigma. Will the twists and turns of fate obscure the ultimate truth? How many more “truths” are…
