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Your Reviews of Your Favourite Books

	The Great Walk of China: From Shanghai to Tibet on Foot by Graham Earnshaw How long would it take to walk across the world's most populous country? The Great Walk of China is a journey into China's heartland, away from its surging coastal cities, where the ripples of prosperity are only just beginning to be felt and many find themselves left behind. Through his conversations with the people he meets along the way, Earnshaw paints a portrait of a nation struggling to come to terms with its newfound identity and its place in the world. Our wandering guide captures the essential kindness and generosity of the Chinese people with brilliant clarity. Graham Earnshaw has a varied background, including a career as a journalist during which he served as Beijing bureau chief for both Reuters and the London Daily Telegraph, and Reuters editor for Asia. He has lived mostly in Shanghai since 1995

	Permanently Temporary byTess Johnston Tess Johnston's peripatetic half a century has taken her through fourteen Foreign Service postings to her retirement ?C and this book, written in her permanently temporary home in Shanghai. She loves to talk, and to write and the range of her interests is broad, as the chapters below reveal. Tess has filled them with life, with anecdotes and with humor. Travel with her in her "little life" in a wider world.

	The Shard Box by Liz Niven Liz Niven is a poet and writer who was born in Glasgow and currently lives in Dumfries. She has published several poety collections,including Stravaigin and Burning Whins and written and edited texts to support Scots and English language work in Education. The Shard Box is her latest book of poems, inspired by stays in Suzhou and Beijing.

	Teacher's Dead by Benjamin Zephaniah A teacher is dead, murdered by two of his students in front of the school. He was a good man. People liked him. So how could this happen? Why? It just doesn't make sense to Jackson, and he is determined to investigate the case until he understands. Benjamin Zephaniah has, once again, chosen a topical and hard-hitting subject - and he deals with it in his own uniquely empathetic and edgy way Benjamin Zephaniah is probably one of the most high-profile international authors writing today, with an enormous breadth of appeal, equally popular with both adults and children. Most well known for his performance poetry with a political edge for adults and ground-breaking performance poetry for children, Benjamin also has his own rap/reggae band, and has appeared on desert Island Discs. He is in constant demand internationally to perform his work: he is (he thinks) Nelson Mandela's favourite poet, and is the only Rastafarian poet to be short-listed for the Chairs of Poetry for both Oxford and Cambridge University. His previous novels for Bloomsbury are Face, Refugee Boy and Gangsta Rap. He has also edited an anthology of poems, The Bloomsbury Book of Love Poems.

	EMBERS by Sandor Marai Reviewed by Austin M. Kramer As traditions scatter on the winds of change and nations shift beneath our feet, the quintessential crisis of modernity is one of definition. Modernity, however, is not a single moment in time so much as every moment in time. In this way, Sandor Marai's lost novels from the first part of the 20th Century are prescient today as they were then. With the glittering age of the Austro-Hungarian Empire long past, two old men meet for a single, vital, and final survey of their lives, filled with love and friendship, but also loss and betrayal. Embers is a slim novel, a single claustrophobic dialogue in an isolated forest estate, but it ranges all across the world and the human experience over the course of a single night. Marai is a master of prose on par with or exceeding his peers Kafka, Hesse, and Mann. His style is brisk, fresh, and dazzlingly vivid. His mastery of the unsaid infuses the book with a sense of mystery and dark drama. With clarity and emotional force, Embers transcends its own generation and cuts to the core of what is modern life.

	Jake's Gigantic List by Ken Spillman Jake wants it all. His birthday list is longer than an anaconda and there??s no way he??s asking for socks or jocks. Nope, this birthday he wants a pirate, a dinosaur and a leopard! Luckily for Jake, Auntie Lyn knows just where to find all three. Packed with fun illustrations by Chris Nixon, Jake??s Gigantic List is about discovering the magic of a great story

	MY NAME IS RED by Orhan Pamuk Reviewed by Austin M. Kramer Unlike many of his characters, Orhan Pamuk has never lived beyond the city where he was born, but in a city like Istanbul there are already hundreds of lifetimes of stories yet to be told. Still, at the bridge between Europe and Asia it can seem that almost much of the far away worlds has already passed through these famous narrows, and traces still lay collecting in the cities Byzantine alleyways. My Name Is Red is a ruminating mystery haunted by love, art, religion, and politics. It is infused with cultures, legends, history and philosophy that all drift through the narrative like wisps of smoke. The tense interplay between ancient traditions and human passions is brilliantly illustrated through intersecting stories of painting, romance, faith, and murder. Slowly, piece by piece, a variety of highly subjective first-person narrators build the story out of beguiling dialogue and enchanting tangents. Fascinatingly, the fragments all begin to fold in upon each other, gradually fusing into a single dramatic conclusion. Desolate winter in the ancient city profuse with rich textures and disparate voices comes to life with the passion, melancholy and elegant, evocative complexity of an Arabesque illumination or Byzantine mosaic.

	THE SEA by John Banville So you think your vocabulary is extensive? Put your money where your mouth is with John Banville??s ridiculously lavish 2005 Booker Prize winner 'The Sea'. Set in a bleak, old fashioned seaside town on the West coast of Ireland, the novel flits between the distant childhood past and the alcohol soaked adulthood present of art historian Max Morden, as he attempts to reconcile the death of his wife and come to terms with a childhood trauma that irrevocably altered his future. A joyous romp the novel is not, but as a work of art it can hardly be faulted. Elegant, disturbing and absolutely remarkable in it's realization of character, place and pure, difficult, raw humanity, The Sea is a novel that will haunt both new readers and Banville fans alike.

	LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding When a plane crashes on a deserted island, with the only survivors a pack of adolescent schoolboys, what follows is at first a riotous testing of the limits of their new found freedom. However, soon their exuberance gives way to something much darker, as fear begins to seep in, and as rescue seems a more and more distant hope, the fragile society the boys have created plunges into chaos. The ultimate novel of dystopia, Lord of the Flies ticks as many boxes as it defies attempts to classify it. At once a thriller, an adventure story, an allegory, and a political treatise, the novel is disturbing, unpredictable, and terrifying in it's exposure of the basest of human instincts. A true classic, this edition of Lord of the Flies contains a new introduction from E.M Forster.

	THE ALCHEMIST by Paulo Coelho Translated into 61 languages, and sold to more than 30 million people worldwide, The Alchemist is a classic of the modern age. A simple, wise and enchanting fable, The Alchemist has inspired readers the world over to listen to their hearts and follow their dreams. In the story we follow the quest of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd, as he journeys to North Africa in the search for missing treasure and spiritual fulfillment It is the simplest things in life that are the most extraordinary: only wise men are able to understand them, a fortuneteller explains to Santiago at the beginning of his quest: the philosophy seems to have worked for Paul Coelho himself, now practically presiding over a literary genre all of his own. A must-read for travelers, soul-searchers, dreamers, and philosophical alchemists.

	SUITE FRANCAISE by Irene Nemirovsky Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Nemirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Nemirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, "Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second, "Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Nemirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing-with compassion and clarity-on individual human dramas.

	THE BANQUET BUG by Yan Geling Yan, whose short fiction was the basis for the movie Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl, offers a pointed critique of capitalism's rise in her native China. A multifaceted mistaken-identity farce, Yan's novel chronicles the adventures of Dan Dong, a laid-off factory worker who wanders into a lavish banquet where journalists are wined and dined and receive "money for your troubles" fees for listening to - and hopefully reporting on - the presentations of corporations and charities. Dan quickly orders business cards that "said he was a reporter from some Internet news site," and hops aboard the banquet gravy train. Yan revels in the absurdity of her premise, and her over-the-top descriptions of banquet fare underscore her outrage at the few who gorge themselves on 'animals from remote mountains and forests' while millions starve. The story changes gears, though, when Dan's reportage leads him into a dangerous, far-reaching scandal and he is arrested during a crackdown on 'banquet bugs.' Yan's concept is clever, but wooden dialogue and some awkward descriptions make it clear that English is not her mother tongue, though this also leads to some seductively nuanced moments ('He smells rather than hears her words carried on her smoky breath') that hint at her enormous potential.

	The Monkey and the Dragon By Linda Jaivin Memoir, biography and travel book, The Monkey and the Dragon is a story about China like nothing you??ve ever read. This is a book about friendship, music, politics and life on the edge. Linda Jaivin first met Taiwan pop star Hou Dejian in 1981. His song ??Heirs of the Dragon?? was the unifying anthem of an awakening generation in Taiwan, Hong Kong and on mainland China. In June 1983 Hou defected to communist China, a stunning and bizarre move which shocked his friends and fans. In 1989 he was one of the last hunger-strikers on Tiananmen Square where he saved the lives of thousands of protestors, and later, with Linda??s help, took refuge in the Australian Embassy in Beijing. After seventy days he returned to the streets but wouldn??t be silenced. In 1990 the authorities abducted him and put him on a fishing boat bound for Taiwan where he became a fengshui master. He still writes the occasional song.