2015 Historical Novel Society Australasia Conference

From 20-22 March, the Historical Novel Society Australasia is holding its inaugural conference in Sydney. The theme is The Historical Novel in Peace and War.  Open to all, the conference will be a celebration of historical fiction in a weekend of talks, panels, debates, book launches and readings.  

Quick Notice: new titles from Asian Review Of Books

Please note these two new titles from Asian Review Of Books, both edited by Peter Gordon, and published through Chameleon Press in Hong Kong. 

Print editions of the Asian Review of Books: Volume 1, Number 3, January 2015, covering October - December 2014.

China 2014 : The Year in Books 

Woman + Pink Motorcycle = Adventure

UK-based Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent is an itinerant adventurer and a travel writer. Her first book, Tuk-tuk to the Road: Two Girls, Three Wheels, 12,500 Miles was an account of how she and a friend drove a tuk-tuk from Bangkok to the UK. She followed up with A Short Ride In The Jungle: The Ho Chi Minh Trail By Motorcycle, her account of seven weeks she spent discovering the Ho Chi Minh Trail, alone, on a bike called The Pink Panther, because of its pretty pink spray job.

New Delhi World Book Fair Reaches One Million Consumers

See here for an interesting overview of the New Delhi World Book Fair, from the US-based online magazine Publishing Perspectives.

This Week In Asian Review Of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site.  If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books.  Here is a list of its newest reviews:

Most Secret Agent of Empire: Reginald Teague-Jones, Master Spy of the Great Game by Taline Ter Minassian reviewed by Peter Gordon
The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics by Andrew Small reviewed by Kerry Brown
Liem Sioe Liong's Salim Group: The Business Pillar of Suharto's Indonesia by Richard Borsuk and Nancy Chng reviewed by Tim Hannigan
Mackinder Revisited: Will China Establish Eurasian Empire 3.0? by Artyom Lukin
The Orphan Sky by Ella Leya reviewed by Peter Gordon

Space for Thought: the LSE Literary Festival

Space for Thought, a literary festival organised by The London School Of Economics (LSE), starts today. Each year, the Festival seeks to explore an idea at the heart of LSE, encapsulated in the motto: to understand the causes of things.  This year, the theme is foundations, and the Festival will therefore examine foundations of various sorts: of knowledge; of society; of identity; of literature. 

Book of the Lunar Year: full results

As announced yesterday Bamboo Heart by Ann Bennett has won the poll to find Asian Books Blog’s Book of the Lunar Year. 

Most people simply voted, but some included comments explaining why they’d made their choice. Here are some comments typical of those made about Bamboo Heart:

The story is gripping, the characters well-drawn and believable and it is very well written. 

A truly compelling read.

This was such a moving story, beautifully told, balancing a flavour of the place and time with a deep involvement in the lives of interesting, well-drawn and, above all, credible characters.

A wonderful uplifting read - a new perspective about the death railway.