The Best Asian Literature, Historical Fiction and Audiobooks  - ASIA BOOKS -

The childhood friends Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang are involved in a mysterious accident in which a friend of theirs is poisoned. But was it an accident?

Years later when they are grown up and all live their own lives, Morann and Ruyu in America and Boyand in China, they are still haunted by what happened when they were young. Will they eventually find out the true circumstances of that day, might one of them have committed a murder?

Shortlisted for the International Bookers Prize 2016

Ten-year-old Marie and her mother invite a young woman called Ai-Ming into their home. Ai-Ming has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests.  Ai-Ming tells Marie the story of her family in revolutionary China and about the three musicians - composer Sparrow, the violin prodigy Zhuli, and the pianist Kai. During the Cultural Revolution they all struggled to remain loyal to one another but also to the music they had devoted their lives to. 

Just years before the outbreak of the Second World War three young women meet at the  Forbidden City nightclub in San Francisco.  The girls Grace, Helen and Ruby all have a Chinese background but face different challenges. By sharing their past secrets and future dreams they become fast friends. But with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, distrust and suspicion threaten to destroy their friendship and an act of betrayal changes everything.

Hundreds of intellectuals are imprisoned in a labour camp to restore their commitment to the Communist ideologies. Inside the camp the prisoners are encouraged to inform on each other for dissident behaviour, so they can gain political favour and the chance at freedom. They are supervised by ‘The Child” and his draconian rules. When the quotas for steel production and grain harvesting 

are set unattainable high, the prisoners face exhaustion and famine and they will go to extremes to survive.

Charlie Wong grows up in New York’s Chinatown, she is the daughter of Chinese parents. Her mother, a former Beijing ballerina, died and Charlie is now living with her father, a noodle maker, and her younger sister in a small apartment. Unsure of her cultural identity, she feels that her world is limited. But when she gets a job at a ballroom dance studio she starts dreaming of a glamorous future. When her sister gets sick and her father wants to treat her only with eastern medicine she is torn between her newfound western identity and the Chinese traditions of her father.

This book explores China's development from 1950 until 2000 through the eyes of Ximen Nao,  a 30 year old landowner, who is executed during Mao Zedong's land reform movement in 1948 so that his land could be redistributed. In the underworld Ximen Nao meets Lord Yama who sends him back to earth where he is reborn as a donkey in his village in 1950. In subsequent reincarnations as animals he is finally  being born again as a man, the writer Mo Yan himself. Through the lives of his various reincarnations we are told about the political movements that swept China under Communist Party rule, including the Great Chinese Famine and Cultural Revolution.

For two years, the American born Mark Salzman is a teacher English at the Changsha Medical University. While he is in China, he learns the Chinese martial arts from kung fu movie actor and martial arts master Pan Qingfu.

In this book he describes his experiences in China, about his relationship with Pan Qingfu, about the political activists he meets and his travels through the country.

Chen Zhen, a Beijing college student, volunteers to work in China’s remote Inner Mongolia region as part of a movement to modernise the countryside. As he admires the balanced lifestyle of the nomadic herdsmen there, he also grows fascinated by the fierce and otherworldly Mongolian wolf. But when government policies threaten the wolves’ extinction, he sees an unfolding ecological tragedy—and a parable for China’s explosive growth.

During the Cultural Revolution, two teenage friends, Luo and the narrator, are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for 're-education', because they are the sons of intellectuals.  In a remote village, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they carry buckets of excrement up and down winding paths and work in a coal mine. Luo and the narrator meet Four-Eyes, the son of a poet, who is also being re-educated. Four-Eyes is hiding a secret set of foreign novels that are forbidden by Chinese law. One of these banned books is from the writer Honoré de Balzac. They also meet the daughter of the local tailor, the little seamstress. With Luo's help the little seamstress learns about the outside world by reading the banned literature and as the two boys flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour the banned literature, the two friends find delight from their grim surroundings. And even the life of the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed.

This is the author's family history that spans the twentieth century, recounting the lives of three female generations in China and contains the biographies of Jung Chang’s grandmother, her mother, and finally her own story: from a daughter of the communist elite and member of the Red Guards to being expelled to the countryside for re-education.

When Jung Chang’s grandmother’s was a child her feet were bound and at a young age she was given to a warlord general as a concubine. As the general lay dying, she fled with her infant daughter. That daughter grew up to become active in the communist movement during the civil war against the Kuomintang.  Following the Communist victory in 1949 she and her husband became senior officials. Their daughter Jung Chang, was raised in the privileged circles of China’s communist elite. But during the Cultural revolution her parents were denounced and tortured and Jung Chang herself was exiled to the edge of the Himalayas.

American expat Paul Leibovitz lives on Lamma, an outlying island of Hong Kong. Paul’s young son Justin died and Paul is divorced and retired from work and by  living on Lamma he tries to isolate himself from the world.

Until one day he meets Elizabeth, a woman who went to Hong Kong with her husband Richard to look for their missing son Richard, who is managing the family's business. Day’s later the body of Richard is found in Shenzhen. Together with his Chinese friend Zhang, who is a homicide detective in Shenzhen, they set on a dangerous journey to investigate the circumstances surrounding the murder of Richard.