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Author Interview: David Leffman

British travel writer David Leffman has written numerous guide books, including ones for Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Iceland. He is also the author of The Mercenary Mandarin: How a British adventurer became a general in Qing-dynasty China, which tells the amazing story of Jersey-born William Mesny. Mesny ran off to [...]

Silence • Shusaku Endo

Endo’s Silence: the Grim Japanese Novel behind Martin Scorsese’s New Film Reviewed by Eric Mader The first Christian missionaries arrived in Japan in 1549. By 1583, an estimated 200,000 Japanese, from both the upper classes and the peasantry, had converted to the new faith, convincing the Catholic Jesuits who had [...]

Author Interview: T.C. Locke (T.C. Lin)

T.C. Locke (aka T.C. Lin) is the author of Barbarian at the Gate: From the American Suburbs to the Taiwanese Army. The book describes how the author - soon after gaining Taiwanese citizenship - found himself called up for two years of compulsory military service in the ROC (Republic of China) army. Why [...]

Author Interview: Jonathan Adams

An interview with Jonathan Adams, author of Welcome Home, Master: Covering East Asia in the Twilight of Old Media. American journalist Jonathan Adams reported on East Asia for a decade. Welcome Home, Master is his honest, funny, and revealing behind-the-scenes look at foreign reporting, and the reality of making a [...]

Heaven Lake • John Dalton

Heaven Lake is part coming-of-age tale, part travelogue – a thoughtful and thought-provoking story about faith, loneliness, and love. It takes its time with some old-fashioned pacing but rewards the patient reader. It is, I think, the best Taiwan expat novel. Regardless of how you define that category, it’s a [...]

The Rose of Tibet • Lionel Davidson

The epic adventure The Rose of Tibet is a stunning work from a largely forgotten writer. Lionel Davidson would make any shortlist for the best thriller writer of the last sixty years whom you’ve never heard of, let alone read. Of his eight novels, three won the prestigious Gold Dagger [...]