Taiwan's most innovative science fiction writer presents three tales of intrigue, espionage, betrayal, political strife, time travel, and Chinese history and mysticism. After thousands of years of civil unrest and countless wars, the weary Huhui people of Sunlon City have once again succumbed to a ruthless and overpowering enemy. In Five Jade Disks, the first book in the trilogy, the imperialistic Shan have enslaved the inhabitants of Sunlon City and imposed a harsh martial order....

An epic spanning more than half a century of Taiwan's history, this breathtaking historical novel traces the fortunes of the Pengs, a family of Hakka Chinese settlers, across three generations from the 1890s, just before Taiwan was ceded to Japan as a result of the Sino-Japanese war, through World War II. Li Qiao brilliantly re-creates the dramatic world of these pioneers—and the colonization of Taiwan itself—exploring their relationships with the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan and their str...

Unfolding in the tense years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Trees Without Wind takes place in a remote Shanxi village in which a rare affliction has left the residents physically stunted. Director Liu, an older revolutionary and local commune head, becomes embroiled in a power struggle with Zhang Weiguo, a young ideologue who believes he is the model of a true revolutionary. Complicating matters is a woman named Nuanyu, who, like Zhang Weiguo and Director Liu, is an outsi...

Hualien, on the Pacific coast of eastern Taiwan, and its mountains, especially Mount Qilai, were deeply inspirational for the young poet Yang Mu. A place of immense natural beauty and cultural heterogeneity, the city was also a site of extensive social, political, and cultural change in the twentieth century, from the Japanese occupation and the American bombings of World War II to the Chinese civil war, the White Terror, and the Cold War.Taken as a whole, these evocative and allus...

Huang Fan burst onto Taiwan's literary scene in the 1980s, publishing pointed urban portraits and political satires that captured the reading public's attention. After decades of innovative work, he is now one of Asia's most celebrated authors, crucial to understanding the development of Taiwanese literature over the past fifty years.The first collection of Huang Fan's work to appear in English, this anthology includes Zero, a prize-winning dystopian novella echoing George...

Guo Songfen's short stories are masterful psychological portraits that play with the echoes of history and the nature of identity. One of the few modernists to truly capture the fallout from such events as the February 28th Incident and the White Terror, Guo Songfen illuminates the quiet core of his characters through a spare and immediate style that is at once a symptom and an allegory of the trauma in which they live.In "Running Mother," a man is torn between his fear of abandonm...

The Newman Prize–winning “wildly visionary and creative novel” of modern China from the Nobel Prize–winning author of Red Sorghum and The Garlic Ballads (The New York Times).In this “epic black comedy,” benevolent landowner Ximen Nao is less than pleased to find himself in the underworld after being killed in Chairman Mao’s land reform movement. And even though he’s unwilling to admit to any wrongdoing, he is soon punished by being sent b...

Number Four will have a difficult life. These are the words that were uttered upon Ting-xing Ye's birth. Soon this prophecy would prove only too true. . . .Here is the real-life story about the fourth child in a family torn apart by China's Cultural Revolution. After the death of both of her parents, Ting-xing and her siblings endured brutal Red Guard attacks on their schools and even in their home. At the age of sixteen, Ting-xing is exiled to a prison farm far from the wo...

Introducing Singaporean DI, Wei Chen . "This exotic amalgam of police procedural, SF, comic fantasy, and horror is a delight from start to finish" ( Locus).When the fourteen-year-old daughter of Singapore Three's most prominent industrialist dies of anorexia, her parents assume that Pearl's suffering has come to an end. But somewhere along the way to the Celestial Shores, Pearl's soul is waylaid, lured by an unknown force to the gates of He...

After the brutal suppression of an unarmed national uprising, which cost thousands of lives, Rory MacLean seized the chance to visit Burma. Travelling from Rangoon to Mandalay and Pagan, into the heart of the Golden Triangle, he heard stories of freedom fighters, government censors, basket weavers, farmers and lovers -- ordinary people struggling to survive under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes in the world. He met Aung San Suu Kyi, the most courageous woman of our time and t...

A compelling historical novel about the tragic alliance between Chinese and English forces in Burma during World War IIBurma is under attack from the Japanese army, and a unit of Chinese soldiers is sent to aid endangered British forces trapped behind enemy lines. China’s assistance hinges on a promise: In return, the Allies will supply China with airplanes and military equipment, much needed to protect their own civilian population. But the troops—including a youn...

Every city contains secret places. Moscow in the tumultuous 1990s is no different, its citizens seeking safety in a world below the streets—a dark, cavernous world of magic, weeping trees, and albino jackdaws, where exiled pagan deities and faery-tale creatures whisper strange tales to those who would listen. Galina is a young woman caught, like her contemporaries, in the seeming lawlessness of the new Russia.In the midst of this chaos, her sister Maria turns into a jackdaw and fli...