About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Edward Wong
Rave The Financial Times A family narrative, but one to which he consciously brings a reporter’s sensibility ... Wong tells a large and complicated story without losing sight of the personal, and the arresting detail of lives defined by China’s recent history.
Yuan Yang
Positive The Observer (UK) It is the tale of a unique time and an intimate picture of what it was like to live through, and learn to navigate, the storm.
Tahir Hamut Izgil, trans. by Joshua L. Freeman
Rave Prospect Magazine (UK) \"...conjure[s] a tragic and unforgettable picture of the destruction of a once vibrant culture, and the brutal persecution of its practitioners ... Waiting to be Arrested at Night is a compelling account of Izgil’s ultimately successful escape to the US. It is a story of mounting fear, as friends disappear one by one, and he and others take to sleeping next to a pile of warm clothes that they can hastily put on if the doorbell rings in the night. If that were to happen, he knew that the journey would end on the concrete floor of a crowded cell ...
Timothy Brook
Rave The New Statesman (UK) Scattered across the maps and paintings that Brook invokes, his 13 encounters take in pirates, merchants, soldiers, traders, explorers, emperors and spiritual leaders – characters in China’s complex trade, military, spiritual and political relationships down the centuries. Brook unravels the threads of these relationships across a canvas of war, friendship, savage struggles for power, lethal epidemic disease, triumph and calamity. It is a dizzying and exhilarating journey ... China is not the first or the only big state to refuse to obey the rules that it has signed up to, but it offers perhaps the most important challenge to the postwar global order, in particular to the UN system, since its foundation. Understanding how China sees itself and how it justifies its actions is critical to understanding today’s world. Great State offers some compelling lessons for today, and for all our futures.
Yan Lianke, Trans. by Carlos Rojas
Mixed The Guardian The novel is set in a village over a 24-hour period in June in which the villagers are afflicted by mass somnambulism, or as the Chinese put it \'dream walking\'. The events are recounted hour by hour through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy, Li Niannian, whose parents eke out a living making and selling funerary paraphernalia ... Yan’s disgust for his country’s moral degradation is unmistakable...In his earlier works, Yan’s bleak view was enlivened with satire. Here, such moments are scarce: his characters follow their increasingly bizarre scripts without engaging the reader, despite Carlos Rojas’s impeccable translation. It is as though the burden of being a writer in today’s China has become too heavy, the accumulation of unthinkable events too great, even for such a master as Yan Lianke.
Madeleine Thien
Rave The Guardian Thien takes this history and weaves it into a vivid, magisterial novel that reaches back to China’s civil war and up to the present day ... a moving and extraordinary evocation of the 20th-century tragedy of China, and deserves to cement Thien’s reputation as an important and compelling writer.