“Tree Fort Over Carnation Lane by Horace Ho is my personal favorite among the stories and novels I’ve translated. It’s a bildungsroman, about the perils of growing up but also about Taiwan society and politics in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s told from the perspective of a middle-aged man, house-husband and father of a two-year-old girl, looking back on his adolescence in the old neighborhood.”- Darryl Sterk (Professor, National Taiwan University)

BY RANDY TAGUCHI

Riku and the Kingdom of White is a coming-of-age story of a wide-eyed boy’s courage, brimming with hope of a bright and shining future. It is also the story of the lost innocence of an untold number of children who continue to live, day after day, undaunted, in Fukushima, after March 11, 2011, in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Translated from the Japanese by Raj Mahtani

With Foreword by Yuki Masami (Professor of Human and Socio-Environmental Studies, Kanazawa University)

Winner of English Pen Award

Financial Times Oppenheimer Emerging Voices Fiction Awards (Longlisted 2016)

Yang Tianyi is a “leftover woman” and under pressure to find a husband. She is attractive and intelligent but knows little of the world, and finally makes a disastrous marriage to a man, Wang Lian. At the end of the 1980s, in Tiananmen Square, she meets her love Hua Zheng again. However, after the political turmoil, Hua Zheng is framed as one of the perpetrators of the disturbances, and is sentenced to prison. Set against the background of China’s turbulent 1980s and 1990s, Crystal Wedding is a novel of searing emotional honesty. (Published on 8 March 2016)

Amid a Sea of Red Flags: Xu Xiaobin on her life-long relationship with literature: featured in ENGLISH PEN ATLAS

Crystal Wedding Preface by the Author

Snow – a short story by Xu Xiaobin (Read Paper Republic Week 41)

Xu Xiaobin and Nicky Harman in Conversation (Wednesday 20th April, University of Leeds)

“This is a powerful and sensitively constructed novel about a literary woman’s search for a fulfilling love against the background of the Tian’anmen tragedy and its aftermath.” – Laifong Leung (Professor Emerita, University of Alberta)

An Australian woman, burdened by the original sin of her Caucasian ancestors, and a Taiwanese woman, haunted by the memories of 100 years of conflict in her homeland, meet as backpackers while travelling in South Korea. As they live and travel together, two women in flight, one from the East and the other from the West, struggle to find a way out of their personal dilemmas. (Published on 28 February 2016)

Shih Chiung-Yu on her new book Masked Dolls: an event @ SOAS London, 28 April 2016

Masked Dolls – An Audience with Shih Chiung-Yu @ Leeds University, 5th May 2016

“Masked Dolls is one of those rare books which after reading reveals itself to be greater than the sum of its parts. Brutal, intense, fascinating.” – The Writes of Woman