CEO’s Secret Lover: volume 1


Yue Yaer - 2019
    After the courtship, she took the money and left. When we meet again, he is a big business emperor, and she is a small manager at a five-star hotel. With a single command, she was forced to become his personal housekeeper, managing his meals, drinking, drinking, scattering, sleeping … "Butler Luo, the CEO's appetite is not good. Go and accompany him to eat something." "The assistant informed her." "Butler Luo, the CEO is not in a good mood. Go and play with him." Butler Luo, the CEO doesn't sleep well, go accompany him … " Luo Qingyun could not bear it any longer, "I am just a housekeeper, not a companion!" The assistant had an innocent look, "The CEO said that if Butler Luo is unwilling, then let her see a little bit more powerful. Does Butler Luo want to test the CEO's power?" I'll give it a try, who's afraid of who!

Is Harry Still On The Boat?


Colin Butts - 2003
    Could any novel be ruder than IS HARRY ON THE BOAT? Possibly this sequel to that brilliantly funny cult novel about holiday reps in Ibiza.

Two Tears on the Window: An Ordinary Canadian Couple Disappears in China


Julia Garratt - 2018
    In August 2014 State Security agents grabbed them, accusing them of espionage. In shock, they were unaware of a Chinese spy arrest in Canada, giving the US “some leverage over China to bring a stop to more than a decade of rampant cybertheft” or that they’d become “bargaining chips in China’s desperate countermove”. (Graff, Garrett M. “How the US Forced China to Quit Stealing—Using a China Spy”. Wired Magazine. October 11, 2018) This compelling story of a Canadian Christian couple who spent 30 years working and raising their family in China, involved in aid, education and social enterprise is a unique parallel journey. From the early days teaching English in a decade of ration coupons and collective work units, Kevin and Julia watched with admiration as China catapulted into the modern age with unprecedented speed. Well-loved in China, the Garratt’s had always been thanked for their work in education, social welfare, social enterprises and community service. In 2007, along with two of their children, they moved to the China/North Korea border, opened a popular coffee shop and provided aid and assistance for marginalized communities in Dandong, China and North Korea. Their sudden disappearance plunged them into a journey where survival took every breath. Through their harrowing ordeal and intense suffering comes life-changing insight. They find themselves part of new community of those who’ve tasted yet overcome the pain of injustice. Courage and kindness, friendship and faith, resonates through the ordeal with the heartbeat of a love journey. Artfully written, Two Tears in the Window combines Kevin’s gifted story-telling and humour with Julia’s ability to let you see through their eyes and draw readers into deeply painful yet profoundly life-changing experiences. For more information or to contact the authors, visit www.twotearsonthewindow.com

The Heart of an Orphan


Amy Eldridge - 2016
    Written by Amy Eldridge, founder and CEO of Love Without Boundaries, this poignant chronicle of LWB's life-changing work, told through the stories of individual children, offers personal insight into the complex issues surrounding orphan care, abandonment, international aid, and adoption. Both thought-provoking and inspirational, "The Heart of an Orphan" reminds us all that while the needs of vulnerable children around the world may seem overwhelming, the human heart triumphs in believing that every life has value and every child deserves love.

1587: A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline


Ray Huang - 1981
    First published by Yale University Press in 1981,[1] it examines how a number of seemingly insignificant events in 1587 might have caused the downfall of the Ming empire. The views expressed in the book follow the macro history perspective.

The Fat Years


Chan Koonchung - 2009
    Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one can care less. Except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that has possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn - not only about their leaders, but also about their own people - stuns them to the core. It is a message that will rock the world... Terrifying methods of cunning, deception and terror are unveiled by the truth-seekers in this thriller-expose of the Communist Party's stranglehold on China today.'An all-encompassing metaphor for today's looming superpower' OBSERVER

The Untouched Crime


Zijin Chen - 2014
    With each new body come the same clues: a jump rope, a cigarette, and a slip of paper that says, “Come and get me.”In the same city, Luo Wen wanders into a park just as a young woman stabs a local thug to death in a desperate act of self-defense. A former criminal investigator who lost his own family in an unsolved case, Luo Wen is familiar with the slippery nature of justice. So he makes the split-second decision to help the terrified woman cover up her crime, leaving behind no trace of evidence.Luo Wen’s friend Yan Liang, a criminologist and professor known for solving each case like a mathematical equation, is called in to help the police on the recent homicides. As he digs deeper, he discovers more questions than answers—and variables that simply don’t add up.While Yan Liang follows his suspicion and Luo Wen covers his tracks, a battle of wits plays out—with the winner’s version of justice as the ultimate prize.

Somewhere Beautiful


Kay Bratt - 2016
    Though she is used to being forgotten, she’s grown tired of being labeled as unwanted. The years have been hard on her, making it impossible to get close to anybody, except for her best friend Kai who has made it all bearable. When bureaucracy threatens to tear them apart, Willow and Kai make a run for it. The only problem is, they aren’t alone. They’ll have to figure out if their excess baggage—a sassy girl who holds an extra chromosome—will be the glue that keeps them together as they navigate street life, or the obstacle that jeopardizes their new found freedom. A fascinating look into modern day orphanage life and what it’s like to feel as though you belong to no one, Kay Bratt’s novel, Somewhere Beautiful, is the first in the two-book Life of Willow series. In Somewhere Beautiful, Bratt weaves a story of loss and loyalty that will have you following three teens as they battle their way through life’s obstacles in the search for the always elusive happily ever after.

The Last Correspondent


Michael Smith - 2021
    After five days under consular protection, Smith was evacuated from a very different China to the country he first visited 23 years earlier.The visit marked a new twist in Australia’s 50-year diplomatic relationship with China which was now coming apart at the seams. But it also symbolised the authoritarianism creeping into every aspect of society under President Xi Jinping over the last three years.From Xinjiang’s re-education camps to the tear-gas filled streets of Hong Kong, Smith’s account of Xi Jinping’s China documents the country’s spectacular economic rise in the years leading up to the coronavirus outbreak.Through first-person accounts of life on the ground and interviews with friends as well as key players in Chinese society right up to the country’s richest man, The Last Correspondent explores what China’s rise to become the world’s newest superpower means for Australia and the rest of the world.

Change


Mo Yan - 2010
    Unlike most historical narratives from China, which are pegged to political events, Change is a representative of “people’s history,” a bottom-up rather than top-down view of a country in flux. By moving back and forth in time and focusing on small events and everyday people, Mo Yan breathes life into history by describing the effects of larger-than-life events on the average citizen.“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”— Nobel Committee for Literature “If China has a Kafka, it may be Mo Yan. Like Kafka, Yan has the ability to examine his society through a variety of lenses, creating fanciful, Metamorphosis-like transformations or evoking the numbing bureaucracy and casual cruelty of modern governments.” —Publishers Weekly, on Shifu: You'll Do Anything for a Laugh

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai


Wang Anyi - 1991
    During the next four decades, Wang Qiyao indulges in the decadent pleasures of pre-liberation Shanghai, secretly playing mahjong during the antirightist Movement and exchanging lovers on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Surviving the vicissitudes of modern Chinese history, Wang Qiyao emerges in the 1980s as a purveyor of "old Shanghai"--a living incarnation of a new, commodified nostalgia that prizes splendor and sophistication--only to become embroiled in a tragedy that echoes the pulpy Hollywood noirs of her youth.From the violent persecution of communism to the liberalism and openness of the age of reform, this sorrowful tale of old China versus new, of perseverance in the face of adversity, is a timeless rendering of our never-ending quest for transformation and beauty.

Fortress Besieged


Qian Zhongshu - 1947
    On the French liner home, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, "With Miss Pao it wasn't a matter of heart or soul. She hadn't any change of heart, since she didn't have a heart." In a sort of painful comedy, Fang obtains a teaching post at a newly established university where the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian's merciless satire. Soon Fang is trapped into a marriage of Nabokovian proportions of distress and absurdity. Recalling Fielding's Tom Jones in its farcical litany of misadventures and Flaubert's "style indirect libre," Fortress Besieged is its own unique feast of delights.

Dream of the Red Chamber


Cao Xueqin - 1791
    Chi-chen Wang's translation is skillful and accurate.

The Rise of Modern China


Immanuel C.Y. Hsu - 1970
    Hs� discusses the end of the last vestiges of foreign imperialism in China, as well as China's emergence as a regional and global superpower. U.S.-China rivalry and the prospect of unification between China and Taiwan are also considered.

What Does China Think?


Mark Leonard - 2007
    We know that China is changing so fast that the maps in Shanghai need to be redrawn every two weeks. We know that China has brought 300 million people from agricultural backwardness into modernity in just thirty years, and that its impact on the global economy is growing at unprecedented speed. We have an image of China as a dictatorship; a nationalist empire that threatens its neighbors and global peace. But how many people know about the debates raging within China? What do we really know about the kind of society China wants to become? What ideas are motivating its citizens? We can name America's neo-cons and the religious right, but cannot name Chinese writers, thinkers, or journalists--what is the future they dream of for their country, or for the world? Because China's rise-- like the fall of Rome or the British Raj--will echo down generations to come, these are the questions we increasingly need to ask. Mark Leonard asks us to forget everything we thought we knew about China and start again. He introduces us to the thinkers who are shaping China's wide open future and opens up a hidden world of intellectual debate that is driving a new Chinese revolution and changing the face of the world.