In 1995, I was invited to the People’s Republic of China to direct a play at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. It was the first Canadian play to be produced in China. It’s amazing what you can learn in a foreign city, with time to explore on your own, ready to soak up the energy, atmosphere, sights, and sounds. The impact is even greater when that city is on the cusp of historic change. The experience power-charged my imagination and was the spark for my first novels–a series of mysteries featuring the detective Zong Fong, Head of Special Investigations, Shanghai. City Rising and its three sequels followed after extensive research.
With his last breath, China’s First Emperor entrusts his followers with a sacred task. Scenes carved into a narwhal tusk show the future of the city at the Bend in the River. The scenes are both glorious and terrifying. The tusk must be guarded; the prophecies must be realized.
Centuries later, the descendants of the Emperor's trusted followers watch as the first prophecy is fulfilled: White Birds on Water arrive bearing opium traders and missionaries from Europe, America, and the Middle East. Among them are brothers Richard and Maxi Hordoon, penniless Jewish traders from Baghdad, along with members of the powerful Vrassoon family. Over many generations, these two families will vie for survival, influence, and power in the emerging city at the Bend in the River—Shanghai.
When it comes to historical fiction, especially one set in Asia, James Clavell is the guy to beat (or at least match).
The story of Shogun unfolds in 17th-century, feudal Japan. An undisputedly exotic setting. A British ship is wrecked on its shores, and its stranded navigator must find his way through Japan's complex cultural and political dynamics. Meanwhile there are other Europeans seeking religious influence and commercial advantage.
Perhaps best of all, the characters are monumental and include one of the strongest and most courageous women in literature since Joan of Arc.
Alternate Cover for 0440178002A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life. All brought together in an extraordinary saga aflame with passion, conflict, ambition, and the struggle for power.Here is the world-famous novel of Japan that is the earliest book in James Clavell’s masterly Asian saga. Set in the year 1600, it tells the story of a bold English pilot whose ship was blown ashore in Japan, where he encountered two people who were to change his a warlord with his own quest for power, and a beautiful interpreter torn between two…
Read enough Cold War spy novels by John le Carré, and you can’t help but wonder, who is this gorgeous writer and how much of what he writes is grounded in historical fact. Then you read his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, and see that le Carré (the writer’s pen name) has been trying to sort all that out himself in his books.
Meet David John Moore Cornwell (John le Carré's real name), raised by his father, Ronnie Cornwell, and schooled in the art of espionage by the British Security Service (MI5) and Intelligence Service (MI6). What you get is source material for what you’d glimpsed (and suspected) all along in A Perfect Spy, Little Drummer Girl, Smiley’s People, and many others. Betrayal goes deep.
The troubled relationship between father and son plays out over a lifetime. And as a writer, you wonder, how much of me is embedded in my books?
"Recounted with the storytelling elan of a master raconteur - by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
The New York Times bestselling memoir from John le Carre, the legendary author of A Legacy of Spies.
From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carre has always written from the heart of modern times. In this,…
It’s 1860, and Garibaldi's Redshirts have landed on the coast. Sicily’s ancient feudal society will soon be overthrown.
These historical events are the backdrop to an intriguing portrait of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, a quiet, intense, and, in many ways, sympathetic member of the doomed Sicilian nobility. War is upon him, and yet Don Fabrizio continues his stately life and loves with meditative detachment.
This may be a story of civil war and social upheaval, but it is also a depiction of ancient families and allegiances, dusty landscapes, and the night sky. It is filled with rich symbolism and prophecy. The Leopard’s message: revolutions come and go, corruption endures. Its contribution to great historical fiction: Don Fabrizio, the last Leopard.
The Leopard is a modern classic which tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution.
'There is a great feeling of opulence, decay, love and death about it' Rick Stein
In the spring of 1860, Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor. Then comes Garibaldi's landing in Sicily and the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them.
Some say that Gatsby is a critique of the corruption of the American dream and the careless rapacity of the Jazz Age. Sure. But who cares?
You love Gatsby because it is about the pursuit of a perfect love; the impossible longing to return to a more innocent, blameless past; and the tenderness of a man once Great brought to his knees by fate. It’s also about the guy who watches it all unfold. Nick Carraway, the unreliable narrator who lives in the little house beside Gatsby’s brilliant mansion, gets drawn into the romantic intrigue and reserves judgment as “a matter of infinite hope.”
And it’s about great writing. Writing that attaches big ideas, like infinite hope, to simple matters of the heart, in language that can’t be mimicked, only possibly acquired with time and frequent re-reads of The Great Gatsby.
As the summer unfolds, Nick is drawn into Gatsby's world of luxury cars, speedboats and extravagant parties. But the more he hears about Gatsby - even from what Gatsby himself tells him - the less he seems to believe. Did he really go to Oxford University? Was Gatsby a hero in the war? Did he once kill a man? Nick recalls how he comes to know Gatsby and how he also enters the world of his cousin Daisy and her wealthy husband Tom. Does their money make them any happier? Do the stories all connect? Shall we come to know…
James Lee Burke’s Robichaud novels are terrific. In this book, Detective Dave Robichaud is caught up in a deadly struggle over a Nazi U-boat buried off the Louisiana coast.
Like any great protagonist, Robichaud is a guy with troubles that pre-date and persist long after any case is closed. This time it’s a sunken Nazi ship that has been the stuff of nightmares since he was a child. The story unfolds in a moody New Orleans, teeming with dark characters all pursuing their own violent ends.
Burke's language is lyrical, his dialogue dead-on. Best of all, he tells this tale with fearless imagination, his eye firmly on the presence of evil in the world.
The 7th Dave Robicheaux novel from Sunday Times bestselling author James Lee Burke
When a Nazi submarine is discovered lying in sixty feet of water off the Louisiana coast some troubled ghosts are ready to be released. A local businessman is offering Detective Dave Robicheaux big money to bring the wreck to the surface, but he is not the only one after the submarine and its mysterious cargo. Neo-Nazis are on the march in New Orleans, a new spirit of hatred is abroad, and its terrifying embodiment, an icy psychopath called Will Buchalter, is stalking Robicheaux's wife.
Bold, funny, and shockingly honest, Ambidextrous is like no other memoir of 1950s urban childhood.
Picano appears to his parents and siblings to be a happy, cheerful eleven-year-old possessed of the remarkable talent of being able to draw beautifully and write fluently with either hand. But then he runs into the mindless bigotry of a middle school teacher who insists that left-handedness is "wrong," and his idyllic world falls apart.
He uncovers the insatiable appetites of a trio of neighboring sisters, falls for another boy with a glue-sniffing habit, and discovers the hidden world of adult desire and hypocrisy. Picano…
Bold, funny, and shockingly honest, Ambidextrous is like no other memoir of 1950s urban childhood. Picano appears to his parents and siblings to be a happy, cheerful eleven-year-old, possessed of the remarkable talent of being able to draw beautifully and write fluently with either hand. But then he runs into the mindless bigotry of a middle school teacher who insists that left-handedness is "wrong," and his idyllic world falls apart. He uncovers the insatiable appetites of a trio of neighboring sisters, falls for another boy with a glue-sniffing habit, and discovers the hidden world of adult desire and hypocrisy. Picano…
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