The book had sat on my shelf, puzzingly unread, for 13 years. And then we went to Hong Kong on holiday and “Kowloon Tong” went along too. Reading a book about the place where you are staying is always fun, with the added piquancy of recognising names and places. This …
Before I even start writing the review – disclosure time. I am in book club in Delhi with the author’s wife, Theo. So I am not totally impartial, especially since we were all privy to some of the labour pains involved in the final stages of this fascinating book. I …
This slim, charming novel about one of the darkest periods in recent Chinese history, the Cultural Revolution, manages to combine ugliness and brutishness with a life-saving thread of hope and young love and dreams. It is 1971, and 2 young men, teenaged sons of then-reviled intellectuals, are sent off to …
