Man Booker shortlist and housekeeping.

Man Booker have announced their shortlist for the 2016 prize. Click here. Do Not Say We have Nothing, by Madeleine Thien, published by Granta, has made the cut.

In Canada in 1991, ten-year-old Marie and her mother invite a guest into their home: a young woman called Ai-Ming, who has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests. 

Ai-Ming tells Marie the story of her family in Revolutionary China - from the crowded teahouses in the first days of Chairman Mao’s ascent to the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s and the events leading to the Beijing demonstrations of 1989.  It is a story of revolutionary idealism, music, and silence, in which three musicians - the shy and brilliant composer Sparrow, the violin prodigy Zhuli, and the enigmatic pianist Kai - struggle during China’s relentless Cultural Revolution to remain loyal to one another and to the music they have devoted their lives to.  Forced to re-imagine their artistic and private selves, their fates reverberate through the years, with deep and lasting consequences for Ai-Ming – and for Marie.

Less loftily, I will now post the main weekly post on Fridays, not Thursdays...

Buy a Book, Give a Book / Jennie Orchard

As promised yesterday, here is a post on promoting literacy in Asia, to tie in with UNESCO's International Literacy Day. It's from Jennie Orchard, of the Hong Kong chapter of Room to Read, the US-based non-profit organisation for improving literacy and gender equality in education in low-income countries. 

Returning from summer....

The sharp-eyed / sharp-memoried / keen amongst you may have noticed the blog is reopening after the summer break a day later than I said it would - that's because I was flying yesterday. So I missed the 50th edition of UNESCO's International Literacy Day. Apologies. Over the coming week, I hope to have a couple of posts on promoting literacy in Asia.

Closing for August / happy reading

The blog is now closed for August. It will reopen on World Literacy Day, Thursday September 8th. 

To those in the northern hemisphere: happy summer reading! 

To those in the southern hemisphere: happy August reading! 

Lion City Lit: Quarterly Literary Review Singapore

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Lion City Lit explores in-depth what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Here Lucía Damacela continues her occasional series of conversations with founders and editors of Singapore-based online literary magazines. Today, the focus is on the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, (QLRS), the longest- running online literary magazine in the country.

500 words from Quincy Carroll

500 words from...is a series of guest posts from authors writing about Asia, or published by Asia-based, or Asia-focused, publishing houses, in which they talk about their latest books. Quincy Carroll is a writer from Massachusetts. After graduating from college in 2007, he moved to Hunan, China, for three years. He currently works at a school in Oakland, California. He published his debut novel Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside through Inkshares, a crowd-funding platform.  Here he talks about how crowd-funding got his novel off the ground.

500 words from Jeffrey Wasserstrom

500 words from...is a series of guest posts from authors writing about Asia, or published by Asia-based, or Asia-focused, publishing houses, in which they talk about their latest books. Jeffrey Wasserstrom is an American historian of modern China who teaches at the University of California, Irvine. He edited a fantastic new reference book, the Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China. Here he talks about selecting the illustrations.