Jailed as an abomination to the Elven race due to her unnatural creation, Willow struggles to understand the dynamics of this new world and wonders who she can trust in order to gain her freedom once more. However, the prophecy of her kind is clear... She must put an end to the race wars, uniting two kingdoms, but only if she can survive the wrath of a powerful king.

    But China is occupied by invading Japanese forces, and in wartime things are not always what they seem.Jiazhi's life is a front. A patriotic student radical, her mission is to seduce a powerful employee of the occupying government and lead him to the assassin's bullet. Yet as she waits for him to arrive at their liasion, Jiazhi begins to wonder if she is cut out to be a femme fatake and coldly take Mr Yi to his death. Or is she beginning to fall in love with him?A passionate tale of espionage, deception and love, accompanied here by four further short stories by Eileen Chang.

    For William Connolly, being a Deputy United States Marshal is more than a job, it’s a calling. Wearing the badge means more than anything in his life, and he would never jeopardize that or his integrity for anything. Then his friend and colleague is murdered by a group of outlaws. When he goes to pursue those responsible, he is told to stand down. Now he’s faced with the toughest decision of his life; he can either disobey orders and risk his career, or live knowing that he allowed the murderers of his best friend to go unpunished.

    Stick Out Your Tongue is a revelation: a startlingly vivid portrait of Tibet, both enchanting and horrifying, beautiful and violent, seductive and perverse.In this profound work of fiction, a Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is walking to a sacred mountain to seek forgiveness for sleeping with his daughter, meets a silversmith who has hung the wind-dried corpse of his lover on the wall of his cave, and hears the story of a young female incarnate lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite. In the thin air of the high plateau, the divide between dream and reality becomes confused.When this book was published in Chinese in 1997, the government accused Ma Jian of "harming the fraternal solidarity of the national minorities," and a blanket ban was placed on his future work. With its publication in English, including a new afterword by the author that sets the book in its personal and political context, readers get a rare glimpse of Tibet through Chinese eyes--and a window on the imagination of one of China's foremost writers.

    China's tradition of "rivers-and-mountains" poetry stretches across millennia. This is a plain-spoken poetry of immediate day-to-day experience, and yet seems most akin to China's grand landscape paintings. Although its wisdom is ancient, rooted in Taoist and Zen thought, the work feels utterly contemporary, especially as rendered here in Hinton's rich and accessible translations. Mountain Home collects poems from 5th- through 13th-century China and includes the poets Li Po, Po Chu-i and Tu Fu. The "rivers-and-mountains" tradition covers a remarkable range of topics: comic domestic scenes, social protest, travel, sage recluses, and mountain landscapes shaped into forms of enlightenment. And within this range, the poems articulate the experience of living as an organic part of the natural world and its processes. In an age of global ecological disruption and mass extinction, this tradition grows more urgently important every day. Mountain Home offers poems that will charm and inform not just readers of poetry, but also the large community of readers who are interested in environmental awareness.

    She has no other family which she is aware of, and in order to survive she leaves her home and lives on the streets. She meets interesting characters and gets into amusing predicaments all in the name of survival, such as jumping trains, being chased through the woods by a crazy man with a loaded shotgun and witnessing an unspeakable crime. After a few months on the streets she runs into another group of kids, Einstein is the oldest and a leader in the group, and they form a family of sorts. For survival and money they lean towards a life a crime which inevitably breaks up their family and sends Cleo and Einstein spiraling into their own adventure. Eventually they settle into a “normal” life however their pasts can’t be hushed forever …

    Some stories have won awards; some have been included in various 'Year's Best' anthologies; some have been well reviewed by critics and readers; and some are simply Ken's personal favorites. Many of the authors collected here (with the obvious exception of Liu Cixin) belong to the younger generation of 'rising stars'.In addition, three essays at the end of the book explore Chinese science fiction. Liu Cixin's essay, The Worst of All Possible Universes and The Best of All Possible Earths, gives a historical overview of SF in China and situates his own rise to prominence as the premier Chinese author within that context. Chen Qiufan's The Torn Generation gives the view of a younger generation of authors trying to come to terms with the tumultuous transformations around them. Finally, Xia Jia, who holds the first Ph.D. issued for the study of Chinese SF, asks What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?.

    Now that I look back over the past few weeks, I can see signs of this coming.I’d thought it was wedding jitters. Our family had begun trickling into Shotgun, our western Montana town, making the incoming life commitment all the more real. That’d be enough to make any groom-to-be nervous. But then my fiancé never showed up to our weddingMy three bridesmaid friends were amazing. They’d spun into action dispersing the guests while I sat, numb. Now we’re driving to the closest dive bar at my request, and I feel lots of things.Hurt. Confused. Betrayed. But most of all, I feel like my insides are alight with anger.I’m ready to blow off some steam. But love isn’t done with me yet. It has one more trick up its sleeve . . .Meant to be Yours is a super hot story about finding true love at the most unlikely of times. No cheating, no cliffhangers, and only consensual shenanigans await. This contemporary instalove romance is first in the Love at First Sight series, and will make you squirm with delight. ;) Steamy happily ever after guaranteed!

    Residing in a grand manor on the glittering Sydney Harbour, her family finds their life has turned upside down. As she navigates this strange new world, Alice must weave an existence from its shimmering mirage.Lies and self-deception are at the heart of this keenly observed story. This is a sharp, biting, and playful tale with a cast of unscrupulous characters adrift in a dream life of their own making. Written with the characteristic delicacy of touch, humor, and emotional insight that make Claire Messud one of our greatest writers."A novelist of unnerving talent." --The New York Times Book Review"[Messud is] among our greatest contemporary writers." --The New Yorker"A perfect frolic of a book, puffed on breezes of beauty and wit: it waltzes you through a little fear, a little darkness, and tips you out, refreshed and laughing, into the sun." --Helen Garner

    Mum's new boyfriend is moving in, along with his daughter, Kayleigh - the most popular girl in school. Poppy's dad is never around and appears to be drifting further and further away. And when it seems like things can't get any worse, Poppy becomes the target of the spiteful school bullies. As the vicious online comments and humiliating pranks escalate, with even her friends joining in, it looks like Poppy has no one left to turn to. Particularly suitable for struggling, reluctant or dyslexic readers aged 12+

    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

    Travel back two hundred years to an era of magic and sensuality. Lose yourself in the blossoming lives and loves of Colin and his twin sister Bea as they Journey from Switzerland to the Emperor's court in China, bringing Colin's extraordinary talent, - his ability to create precision clockwork machines that looked human, drew pictures, played music and were the rage of Europe. And pass through the gates of golden-spired Ayuthia where, in a world of passion and opulaten splendor, brother and sister meet their astonishing and tumultuous destinies.

    These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness—save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes, and strange birthmarks. Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast, and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self. Part detective story, part metaphysical enquiry, Strange Beasts of China engages existential questions of identity, humanity, love and morality with whimsy and stylistic verve.

    It is the lively and wise juxtaposition of cultures, generations, and emotions that characterize May-lee Chai's amazing stories. Within them, readers will find a complex blend of cultures spanning China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and finally, the world at large.With luminous prose and sharp-eyed observations, Chai reveals her characters' hopes and fears, and our own: a grieving historian seeking solace from an old lover in Beijing, a young girl discovering her immigrant mother's infidelity, workers constructing a shopping mall in central China who make a shocking discovery. Families struggle with long-held grudges, reinvent traditions, and make mysterious visits to shadowy strangers from their past--all rendered with economy and beauty.With hearts that break and sometimes mend, with families who fight and sometimes forgive, the timely stories in Useful Phrases for Immigrants illuminate complicated lives with empathy and passion. Chai's stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world.

    By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, Liao Yiwu managed to get his subjects to talk openly and sometimes hilariously about their lives, desires, and vulnerabilities, creating a book that is an instance par excellence of what was once upon a time called “The New Journalism.” The Corpse Walker reveals a fascinating aspect of modern China, describing the lives of normal Chinese citizens in ways that constantly provoke and surprise.From the Trade Paperback edition.