Fiction books about China

by Clare Kane

Peking, 1900. Amidst the violence and terror of the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion, a young China-born Englishwoman finds herself under siege alongside the city’s overseas population. Independent-minded and unaccustomed to European ways, Nina Ward embarks on an affair with married diplomat Oscar Fairchild, risking her future as death and despair draw ever closer. Journalist Alistair Scott records the controversy, trying to separate the reckless pair as the siege grows bloodier and the scandal grows louder. Based on real historical events, Dragons In Shallow Waters is a story of love, betrayal and secrets that reach across time and continents.

“Lush and sophisticated. This is a seamless melding of two illicit love affairs with the atrocious events in Peking in the summer of 1900. In elegant prose, Clare Kane vividly evokes the Boxer Rebellion catastrophe and deftly paints her characters in all their emotional complexity. The riveting story and its sympathetic characters will stay with you long after the final pages.” -Alice Poon, author of The Green Phoenix

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by Harry Miller

As China’s once-glorious Ming dynasty tears itself apart, a young man and woman struggle to stay together. Set before the backdrop of one of the great upheavals in Chinese history, Southern Rain is the story of a carpenter’s son who falls for a brilliant Buddhist nun just as she is set to become a powerful man’s concubine. Their adventures lead them north to Beijing and south to the Yangtze valley, as art, theater and poetry give way to foreign invasion, banditry and chaos. In a world of turmoil, their search for freedom and safety comes to mirror China’s own. Southern Rain is both an intimate portrait of a man and a woman and a sweeping historical epic, presenting China’s tumultuous seventeenth century on a human scale.

“With the historian’s eye for significant detail, Harry Miller tells a compelling love story behind which, nearly overpowering his protagonists, is the cataclysm that was the seventeenth-century collapse of China’s last dynasty and the establishment of the Manchu Qing empire. Miller creates a rich tapestry of this long-past era, a period of great tragedy, and of hope. Readers are not likely soon to forget the heroine of this novel, nor her less capable husband; their strengths, and their vulnerability.” -Robert E. Hegel, Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Chinese, Washington University, St. Louis

“Harry Miller is a writer. This book proves it. Decide for yourself.” -Sonny Brewer, author, The Poet of Tolstoy Park

“Harry Miller masterfully weaves an offbeat story of love amidst chaos in 17th century China. Steeped in cultural and literary minutiae, the novel bristles with heart and wit. Miller’s writing is luminous and animated and his expansive research shines through. An intoxicating work of historical fiction.” -Alice Poon, author of The Green Phoenix

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Alice Poon

A novel of Empress Xiaozhuang, the woman who re-made Asia

With the fate of East Asia hanging in the balance, one Mongolian woman manipulates her lovers, sons and grandsons through war and upheaval to create an empire that lasted for 250 years.

The Green Phoenix tells the story of the Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang, born a Mongolian princess who became a consort in the Manchu court and then the Qing Dynasty’s first matriarch. She lived through harrowing threats, endless political crises, personal heartaches and painful losses to lead a shaky Empire out of dead end. The story is set against a turbulent canvas as the Chinese Ming Dynasty is replaced by the Qing. Xiaozhuang guides her husband, her lover, her son and her grandson – all emperors and supreme leaders of the Qing Empire – to success against the odds.

Kindle version, click here.

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A novel of Lao Tzu. By Wayne Ng

A novel of Lao Tzu. In the sixth century BC, the legendary philosopher Lao Tzu seeks redemption and an opportunity to spread his beliefs by joining the royal court, but is greeted by a vainglorious King, a mad Queen and a deadly struggle for power in progress between the twin princes. In one of them, the thoughtful but hesitant heir to the throne Prince Meng, he discovers a protégé. But Lao Tzu’s ideas of peace and natural order leave him ill-prepared for the intrigue of the palace and the noxious rivalry between Meng and his younger twin brother, the bold and decisive Prince Chao. Confucius arrives and allies with Chao, thus raising the stakes for control of the dynasty culminating in a venomous clash between Taoism and Confucianism. With the King ailing and war imminent, Lao Tzu is betrayed and accused of spying. The Master Philosopher must cast aside his naivete and idealism to fight for his life.

Wayne Ng’s Finding the Way vividly reimagines the life and times of China’s most mysterious philosopher, Lao Tzu. On the utmost fringes of the empire, somewhere between history and myth, Lao Tzu relates the story of his life. Finding the Way is a must for fans of Chinese history and philosophy, and for lovers of a tale well-told.—Will Buckingham, author of The Descent of the Lyre

In this action-packed yet thoughtful thriller, narrated by a fictional Lao Tzu, Ng’s deep sense of history and his profound understanding of ancient thought produces a riveting story. We witness the best of Taoist and Confucianist intentions and ideals. Yet they are doomed in the short term to fail when confronted by the raw reality of ambition and power. Nevertheless they remain the bedrock of Chinese civilization.—Adam Williams, author of The Dragon’s Tail

ISBN:
978-988-8422-78-4
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A Cycle of Stories from the I Ching – The Book of Changes

The Chinese I Ching, the Book of Changes, is one of the oldest and strangest of all books, a masterpiece of world literature, a divination manual and a magnet for the deranged and the obsessive. In Sixty-Four Chance Pieces, novelist and philosopher Will Buckingham puts the I Ching to work, using it to weave together sixty-four stories of chance and change, each flowing from one of the I Ching’s 64 hexagrams. Moving between myth, fable and travel-writing, Sixty-Four Chance Pieces offers an attempt to make sense of the maddening, changeable book that is the I Ching with tales of inventors and fox-spirits, ancient poets and non-existent rulers, kleptomaniac pensioners and infernal bureaucrats. Like the I Ching itself, this new Book of Changes is a puzzle, a conundrum and a journey of many transformations, where nothing is quite what it seems.

Press Release

Rhiannon Jenkins Tsang review June 2015

Asia Review of Books review July 2015

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