Headed up to Edinburgh to help William Dalrymple launch his new book The Golden Road – I would urge China (and Japan, Korea, SE Asia people) to get a copy and read as it’s an important book about the shaping of the East Asian era in the classical period. We certainly all had fun talking about it…. and if you’d like to watch William’s presentation and the conversation you can online at the Edinburgh International Book Festival site on a ‘pay what you can’ basis – click here
Here a photo of the Russian Monument, taken in 1910, to the Russians killed in the Boxer Rebellion (1900) in Tientsin (Tianjin). After 1917 the Russian’s renounced their extraterritorial rights to a concession in the city.
Now up for pre-order, the UK edition of my next book, Her Lotus Year: China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson (Elliot & Thompson) – out in November….. click here for amazon and Bookstore.org here
Earlier this year I wrote a piece for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine on the artists Anna Hotchkis and Mary Mulikin. Hotchkis trained in her native Edinburgh, worked in China in the 30s and is perhaps most associated with the artists’ colony at Kirkcudbright in Scotland. Since publishing that article (click to read here) I’ve come across another Hotchkis painting I didn’t know – this one of Hong Kong…
My latest column for Macau Closer magazine is on Daniel Carney’s door-stopper of a novel, Macau, published in 1984. Not perhaps Clavell, but will occupy a long plane/train ride….click here to read
My latest long read for the South China Morning Post weekend magazine is on Maria Wendt, the Shanghai nurse turned drugs mule who smuggled a huge amount of dope into LA, was busted, escaped, recaptured, imprisoned and came to a very sad end while the narcotics ring that lured her in met far more mysterious fates in New York, Mexico City and Shanghai….click here to read
Happy also to blurb this tale – The Phoenix and the Firebird (Earnshaw Books) – that mashes up fantasy (not normally my genre at all) with old China – A bullet-riddled train staggers into a Chinese station in 1920, and Lucy discovers that her father, a Russian officer, has been kidnapped. A mysterious feather guides her into a dangerous realm of magic and monsters to rescue him. But she knows she can’t take on the quest alone. With her friend Su, a girl as quick with words as with her fists, the two uncover the terrifying truth: a notorious warlord has seized Lucy’s father. Worse, he is about to invade their city. The friends brave the criminal underworld, cross a haunted forest, and outsmart creatures they thought lived only in fairytales. But will their wits and bravery be enough to beat the warlord’s army of human soldiers and magical beasts?
“A Peking caught between an imperial city and a new republic; a world where harsh reality mingles with myth and magic. Warlords, exiled Russians, gangsters, a child in search of her father. There are worlds within worlds in old Peking – real and imagined. Kossiakoff and Crawford bring them all together and to life.” – Paul French, New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Peking and City of Devils
