A Dickensian sweep and a vast cast of characters, Upadhyay created an ancient world saturated with the spirit of our time and shaped by political ambition and dark vision . . . A grand novel indeed. --Ha Jin, National Book Award-winning author of Waiting

An epic tale of love and political violence set in earthquake-ravaged Darkmotherland, a dystopian reimagining of Nepal, from the Whiting Award-winning author of Arresting God in Kathmandu

In Darkmotherland, Nepali writer Samrat Upadhyay has created a novel of infinite embrace--filled with lovers and widows, dictators and dissidents, paupers, fundamentalists, and a genderqueer power player with her eyes on the throne--in an earthquake-ravaged dystopian reimagining of Nepal.

At its heart are two intertwining narratives: one of Kranti, a revolutionary's daughter who marries into a plutocratic dynasty and becomes ensnared in the family's politics. And then there is the tale of Darkmotherland's new dictator and his mistress, Rozy, who undergoes radical body changes and grows into a figure of immense power.

Darkmotherland is a romp through the vast space of a globalized universe where personal ambitions are inextricably tied to political fortunes, where individual identities are shaped by family pressures and social reins, and where the East connects to and collides with the West in brilliant and unsettling ways.

Set in an Armenian mountain village immediately after the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the early 1990s, these thirty-one linked short stories trace the interconnected lives of villagers tending to their everyday tasks, engaging in quotidian squabbles, and celebrating small joys against a breathtaking landscape.

Yet the setting, suspended in time and space, belies unspeakable tragedy: every character contends with an unbearable burden of loss. The war rages largely off the book's pages, appearing only in fragmented flashbacks. Abgaryan's stories focus on how, in the war's aftermath, the survivors work, as individuals and as a community, to find a way forward. Written in Abgaryan's signature style that weaves elements of Armenian folk tradition into her prose, these stories of community, courage, and resilience celebrate human life, where humor and love and hope prevail in unthinkable circumstances.

WINNER OF THE 2023 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD IN PROSE

An abandoned package is discovered in the Paris Metro: the subway workers suspect it's a terrorist bomb. A Vietnamese woman sitting nearby, her son asleep on her shoulder, waits and begins to reflect on her life, from her constrained childhood in communist Hanoi, to a long period of study in Leningrad during the Gorbachev period, and finally to the Parisian suburbs where she now teaches English. Through everything runs her passion for Thuy, the father of her son, a writer who lives in Saigon's Chinatown, and who, with the shadow of the China-Vietnam border war falling darkly between them, she has not seen for eleven years.

Through her breathless, vertiginous, and deeply moving monologue from beside the subway tracks, the narrator attempts to once and for all face the past and exorcize the passion that haunts her.

Elephant Herd is a vivid and captivating novel by the Taiwan-based Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) writer Zhang Guixing, whose distinctive style evokes the jungles of Southeast Asia. It is an atmospheric account of a Malaysian Chinese young man's journey upriver deep into the Sarawak rainforest of northwest Borneo in search of his uncle, the leader of a Communist guerilla group. Venturing through the jungle, the protagonist--largely referred to only as the boy--enters a verdant and vertiginous world of wild creatures and political peril.

Jumping backward and forward in time, Elephant Herd intermingles fractured, fragmentary episodes with lush, immersive descriptions of the natural world. Its main narrative begins in the 1970s and proceeds to explore the repercussions of Sarawak's midcentury Communist insurgency. Focusing on the boy, his extended family, and his Indigenous classmate and travel companion, Zhang examines the complex relations among ethnic Chinese, local Malays, and Indigenous peoples. The novel teems with crocodiles, turtles, elephants, and countless other species of flora and fauna; as the boy's journey progresses, the human and nonhuman worlds begin to blur together and even camouflage themselves as each other. Elegantly translated by Carlos Rojas, Elephant Herd is a hypnotic and compelling work by a major Sinophone writer.

An intimate look at the lives, loves, horrors, and dreams of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule

A heartbreaking tragedy in the vein of The Kite Runner from a major English-speaking Afghan figure famous for his books and long career in politics

Siamak Herawi brings Afghan women centerstage and takes us deep into the heart of his motherland to witness the reality of their lives under the Taliban's most extreme interpretation of Islam. Based on true stories, the result is a sobering and harrowing tale that relates the current ethos of a country under occupation by one power or another for more than half a century.

Told in a direct, conversational prose, this chorus of voices offers us a vivid picture of the endless cycle of the suffering of girls and women in the grip of the Taliban authorities, of the imbalance of power and opportunity.

The central figures illuminate the power of love, friendship, and generosity in the face of poverty and oppression. Their experiences and dilemmas have a visceral power and we become deeply attached to Kowsar, Geesu, and Simin. These are testaments of resilience, hope, courage, and visceral fear, of doors of opportunity opening just a crack that offer a way out.

In Sara Khalili's vibrant and nuanced translation from the Persian, Tali Girls tears down the curtain and exposes the treacherous realities of what women are up against in modern-day, war-torn Afghanistan.

A sweeping epic about an unlikely spy, a secret love affair, and the uncontrollable forces that will test even the most unbreakable ties. Set in Malay (now Malaysia) during World War II, this spellbinding most anticipated (Oprah Daily) novel chronicles a mother and her children as they grapple with the consequences of colonial power and the shocking repercussions that follow for their family and their country.

Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara's family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day.

Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the truth.

A decade prior, Cecily had been desperate to be more than a housewife to a low-level bureaucrat in British-colonized Malaya. A chance meeting with the charismatic General Fujiwara lured her into a life of espionage, pursuing dreams of an Asia for Asians. Instead, Cecily helped usher in an even more brutal occupation by the Japanese. Ten years later as the war reaches its apex, her actions have caught up with her. Now her family is on the brink of destruction--and she will do anything to save them.

Spanning years of pain and triumph, told from the perspectives of four unforgettable characters, The Storm We Made is a dazzling saga about the horrors of war; the fraught relationships between the colonized and their oppressors, and the ambiguity of right and wrong when survival is at stake.

Fallen innocents on blood-stained streets. The defiant banging of pots and pans echoing in the darkness. The birth of a springtime revolution amidst the interrupted lives of a country and its people. On the morning of 1 February 2021, a coup d'état was initiated by the Tatmadaw, Myanmar's military, effectively overthrowing the democratically elected members of the country's ruling party, the National League for Democracy, and casting Myanmar into chaos.

This volume collects the poetry and prose of the many writers, cultural figures, and everyday people on the ground in Myanmar's urban centres, rural countryside and in the diaspora, as they document, memorialize, or merely try to come to grips with the violence and traumas unfolding before their eyes. Written in English or translated from the original Burmese the collection includes some of Myanmar's most important contemporary authors and dissidents, such as Ma Thida, Nyipulay and K Za Win, as well as up and coming authors and poets from all over Myanmar, reflecting the country's rich cultural and ethnic diversity.

In addition, poetry and essays that reflect socioeconomic life of the so-called transitional Myanmar (2010-2020), a period of relative freedom for writers when much of the censorship regime was lifted and the internet and social media were introduced in the country, as well as prominent protest poems and essays, by dissidents Min Ko Naing, U Win Tin and Min Lu, who lived through the hopes and horrors of the 1988 uprising of Myanmar are featured in this volume.

A feast for the literary imagination, an elegy to those who have fallen, and a courageous act of defiance by those that continue to fight, these firsthand accounts provide an important window into a crucial moment in Myanmar's history.

Review quotes:

Picking off new shoots will not stop the spring brings together for the first time in print⁠-in translations both inspired and felicitous⁠-poet-heros of the '88 Uprising, new voices from within the Chin, Kachin and Rohingya minorities, young poet-warriors of the ongoing armed struggle, and early martyrs of the Spring Revolution, notably K Za Win and Khet Thi. Together they raise a cri de coeur of resistance, resilience, and⁠-through their poetry⁠-redemption. --Wendy Law-Yone (Author of A Daughter's Memoir of Burma, Golden Parasol, The Road to Wanting, Irrawaddy Tango, and The Coffin Tree)

About the Editors:

Ko Ko Thett is a Burma-born poet, literary translator, and poetry editor for Mekong Review. He started writing poems for samizdat pamphlets at the Yangon Institute of Technology in the '90s. After a brush with the authorities in the 1996 student protest, and a brief detention, he left Burma in 1997 and has led an itinerant life ever since. Thett has published and edited several collections of poetry and translations in both Burmese and English. His poems are widely translated and anthologised. His translation work has been recognised with an English PEN award. Thett's most recent poetry collection is Bamboophobia (Zephyr Press, 2022). He lives in Norwich, UK.

Brian Haman is a researcher and lecturer in the department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna. He completed his PhD in literature at the University of Warwick (UK) and has studied or held research appointments in Europe, China, and the US. A book, art, and music critic, he writes widely on contemporary culture from Asia, and, since 2017, has been an editor of The Shanghai Literary Review. His forthcoming books include an anthology of contemporary Chinese-language poetry in translation as well as an edition of the unpublished works of exiled Austrian Jewish writer Mark Siegelberg.

After spending sixteen years in prison for a crime of the heart, Shiro Kikutani is released into a world he no longer recognizes. He must readjust to the bright and vigorous stimulus of Tokyo while fending off his own dark memories. In a spare yet powerful style, Akira Yoshimura paints the psychology of a quiet man navigating his way through the unsuspected traumas of freedom-finding a job, finding a home, even something as simple as buying an alarm clock. Kikutani takes comfort in the numbing repetition of his new daily life, only to be drawn inexorably back to the scene of his crime. A subtly powerful story, On Parole explores the fragile life of a murderer and the conditions of freedom in an unforgiving society. Yoshimura's startling novel raises provocative questions of guilt and redemption.

This is the first critical monograph to explore and delineate the emergent field of witness literature across fiction, nonfiction, memoir, journalism and survivor testimony from the Global South.

Witness Literature examines writing from three sites of exceptional violence and fluid justice: the Cambodian Genocide, the Sri Lankan civil war and the borderscapes of honour-based violence in Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey/Türkiye, the UK and beyond. Drawing on the intersecting fields of literary analysis, biopolitics, testimony studies, trauma theory and postcolonial studies, this book examines the place of the fictive in writings of traumatic events; takes up the call to expand Western understanding of the normatively human by focusing on work that bears witness from sites of compromised belonging; and shows how witness literature by migrant subjects marks an important intervention in Western readings of trauma.

Ambitious in cultural and conceptual reach, Witness Literature invokes a wide range of texts from within the nations studied and from diasporic writers. These include: eyewitness accounts and survivor stories gathered in Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields; memoirs and autobiographies like François Bizot's The Gate, Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father and Ajith Boyagoda's re-told memoir, A Long Watch; Sanam Maher's biography of the internet star Qandeel Baloch that exposes the truth technologies of the media; pseudonymous work that reconfigures the authorising identity of the witness; novels by diasporic writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Vaddey Ratner, Madeleine Thien and Anuk Arudpragasam; the posthumously published editorial of an assassinated journalist who anticipated his death; fabricated testimony and fictive reconstructions of real events including Shehan Karunatilaka's phantasmagoric novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida; and such works as Elif Shafak's Honour, Salman Rushdie's Shame and Shalimar the Clown.

Offering a compelling and surprising analysis of the representation of life under the threat, Minoli Salgado exposes how the mixed cultural allegiances of the border witness mark a double agency that challenges multiple orthodoxies and shows how testimonial work from the Global South maps new moral communities by opening up alternative ways of reading truth, subjectivity, healing and justice.

CHINA' S SEAMY UNDERSIDE Kitty and her teenage friends, squatting in an empty apartment, are looking for gas to cook instant noodles. Bai Song and his wife, who live in the unit across the hallway, have a well-equipped kitchen with all the mod cons. Plus they're old and retired, meaning they're ripe for a bit of rough fun, Clockwork Orange-style. China at the turn of the century. Everything is upside down. Respect for your elders? You've got be joking. Communism? Yeah right. Cut-throat capitalism is the only way to get ahead. To get rich is glorious . In ten wonderfully surreal stories, Anne Stevenson-Yang conjures up the atmosphere of a society in freefall. China as you've never imagined it: a wife who fakes her divorce so she can buy an apartment; neglected teens who tie up an elderly couple so they can use their kitchen; a country girl who poisons a disabled man for a residence permit. Living in China for nearly twenty-five years, Stevenson-Yang became fascinated in the muffled violence beneath the placid surface .

Brave and vivid.--New York Review of Books
These enchanting stories from early modern Bengal reveal how Hindu and Muslim traditions converged on timeless themes of human morality, social culture, and survival.

The Bengali stories in this collection are first and foremost tales of survival. Each story in Needle at the Bottom of the Sea underscores the need for people to work together--not just to overcome the challenges of living in the Sundarban swamps of Bengal, but also to ease hostilities born of social differences in religion, caste, and economic class.

Translated by award-winning scholar of early modern Bengali literature Tony K. Stewart, Needle at the Bottom of the Sea brims with fantasy and excitement. Sufi protagonists travel through a world of wonder where tigers talk and men magically grow into giants, a Hindu princess falls in love with a Muslim holy man, and goddesses rub shoulders with kings and merchants. Across religion, class, and gender, what binds these fabulous stories together is the characters' pursuit of living honorably and morally in a difficult, corrupt world.

Sanshirō (1908) is a novel by Natsume Sōseki. Inspired by the author's experience as a student from the countryside who moved to Tokyo, Sanshirō is a story of family, growth, and identity that captures the isolation and humor of adjusting to life on one's own. Recognized as a powerful story by generations of readers, Sanshirō is a classic novel from one of Japan's most successful twentieth century writers.

Raised on the island of Kyushu, Sanshirō Ogawa excels in high school and earns the chance to continue his studies at the University of Tokyo. On his way there, he naively accepts an invitation to share a room with a young woman in Nagoya, realizing only too late that she has other things than sleep in mind. As he adjusts to life in the big city, he finds himself stumbling into more uncomfortable situations with women, radical political figures, and interfering colleagues, all of which shape his sense of identity while teaching him the value of trust, courage, and self-respect. While he misses his family and friends in Kyushu, Sanshirō learns to value his newfound independence, forming friendships that will last a lifetime. Sanshirō proves a gifted student but struggles to understand the intricacies of academic life. As he begins a relationship with the lovely Mineko, he begins to doubt his ability to defy tradition. Will he return home to raise a family in Kyushu, or remain in Tokyo to chart a path of his own? Eminently human, Sanshirō is a beloved story of isolation, morality, and conflict from a master of Japanese fiction.

This edition of Natsume Sōseki's Sanshirō is a classic work of Japanese literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Elephant Herd is a vivid and captivating novel by the Taiwan-based Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) writer Zhang Guixing, whose distinctive style evokes the jungles of Southeast Asia. It is an atmospheric account of a Malaysian Chinese young man's journey upriver deep into the Sarawak rainforest of northwest Borneo in search of his uncle, the leader of a Communist guerilla group. Venturing through the jungle, the protagonist--largely referred to only as the boy--enters a verdant and vertiginous world of wild creatures and political peril.

Jumping backward and forward in time, Elephant Herd intermingles fractured, fragmentary episodes with lush, immersive descriptions of the natural world. Its main narrative begins in the 1970s and proceeds to explore the repercussions of Sarawak's midcentury Communist insurgency. Focusing on the boy, his extended family, and his Indigenous classmate and travel companion, Zhang examines the complex relations among ethnic Chinese, local Malays, and Indigenous peoples. The novel teems with crocodiles, turtles, elephants, and countless other species of flora and fauna; as the boy's journey progresses, the human and nonhuman worlds begin to blur together and even camouflage themselves as each other. Elegantly translated by Carlos Rojas, Elephant Herd is a hypnotic and compelling work by a major Sinophone writer.

Sanshirō (1908) is a novel by Natsume Sōseki. Inspired by the author's experience as a student from the countryside who moved to Tokyo, Sanshirō is a story of family, growth, and identity that captures the isolation and humor of adjusting to life on one's own. Recognized as a powerful story by generations of readers, Sanshirō is a classic novel from one of Japan's most successful twentieth century writers.

Raised on the island of Kyushu, Sanshirō Ogawa excels in high school and earns the chance to continue his studies at the University of Tokyo. On his way there, he naively accepts an invitation to share a room with a young woman in Nagoya, realizing only too late that she has other things than sleep in mind. As he adjusts to life in the big city, he finds himself stumbling into more uncomfortable situations with women, radical political figures, and interfering colleagues, all of which shape his sense of identity while teaching him the value of trust, courage, and self-respect. While he misses his family and friends in Kyushu, Sanshirō learns to value his newfound independence, forming friendships that will last a lifetime. Sanshirō proves a gifted student but struggles to understand the intricacies of academic life. As he begins a relationship with the lovely Mineko, he begins to doubt his ability to defy tradition. Will he return home to raise a family in Kyushu, or remain in Tokyo to chart a path of his own? Eminently human, Sanshirō is a beloved story of isolation, morality, and conflict from a master of Japanese fiction.

With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Natsume Sōseki's Sanshirō is a classic work of Japanese literature reimagined for modern readers.

Casts a beguiling spell. -Rachel Heng, author of The Great Reclamation

Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award

In this time-hopping and genre-defying novel, the passing of the Great Comet of 1996 sets in motion a series of inexplicable events in Kyoto, changing the lives of four friends forever.

Four friends meet in Kyoto in 1996 under the passage of Comet Hyakutake through the sky: a journalist arrives with her gallerist friend to fulfill her dying mother's last wish, while a runaway discovers a crying woman in front of a train station. For Jing, Mateo, Isaac and Tori, their weekend of friendship is accompanied by other spectacular signs: fireworks over the Kamo River, phantoms at an underground rave, a talking macaque, and multiple disappearances. Over the course of decades and the span of countries including Singapore, Spain and Malaysia, the consequences of their meeting unfold into meandering and intersecting paths as they fall in love, grow old, grieve, and dream.

At the heart of Daryl Qilin Yam's ambitious, time-hopping, genre-defying novel is an assured and sensitive study of loss and the endurance of love and companionship. When the beauty of art is not enough to make up for suffering, what do we have left?

Flowers of Lhasa is a stark and urgent tale of four young women thrown into the seedy underbelly of a sacred city undergoing rapid change.

After coming to the big city to look for work, a tragedy befalls Drölkar and leads her to a nightclub called the Rose and a life of selling her body for money. There, she falls in with Yangdzom, Dzomkyi, and Xiao Li. Four women--three Tibetan, one Chinese--all migrant laborers who move to the city and whose misfortunes take them down similar paths. We read of their encounters with wealthy, callous, and often violent men, their struggles to stay afloat and to support their impoverished families, and the hopes and dreams they still cherish despite it all.

Tsering Yangkyi's novel paints a vivid portrait of Lhasa, Tibet's cultural and religious capital. This is a holy city where thousands of pilgrims daily circumambulate the Potala Palace and the Jokhang Temple, but it is also a modern city, with all the problems of the modern world. While immersing us in the vibrant uniqueness of Tibetan life, Flowers of Lhasa also paints a haunting picture that deals with global and timely concerns.

(Winner of English PEN Award)

About the Author

Tsering Yangkyi is one of the most recognized names in the Tibetan literary world. She began publishing fiction in the 1980s and has built up a body of work that concerns itself first and foremost with women and the underclass of Tibetan society. She began Flowers of Lhasa, her first novel, in 2009, and it took seven years to complete. When it was published in 2016, it became only the second novel by a Tibetan woman. In Tibet, the publication of her novel was immediately met with widespread acclaim, from critics and readers alike.

An absorbing, joyous, and colorful collection of stories from the qissa genre.

Fabulous Machinery for the Curious presents the first English translation of some of the finest texts from the qissa genre. In this book, acclaimed translator Musharraf Ali Farooqi gathers the greatest of these tales, written or transcribed in the Urdu language by master storytellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Spreading from Persia to Arabia to South Asia over 1,500 years, the qissa appropriated verse and prose narratives to become the preeminent storytelling genre. The combined traditions of the many cultures of Indo-Islamic civilization resulted in a flowering of qissas in Urdu. This collection distills a vast body of oral and written literature, from resplendent sagas of romantic love and thrilling adventures in fairyland to picaresque stories of deception and haunting tales of nobility and viciousness. Fabulous Machinery for the Curious brings these forgotten gems to a new generation of readers and reminds us of the abiding power that great stories and ancient genres have for engaging the contemporary world.

Confucius sits in his chair. A mute uncle utters his first word in decades. A talking potato is sworn to confidentiality.

These are stories written with Liang Wern Fook's left hand. All authors write with this hand, coaxing out left-handed stories from a right-handed reality. Liang has been writing with his right hand for a long time, but in this thought-provoking collection, he has returned to his left, crafting stories that surprise even his right. Stories that are replete with playful irony, ranging from the absurd to the comical; stories which transcend personal difficulties to reveal shared tragedies, collectively endured.

About the Author:

Liang Wern Fook is a writer, musician, singer, and professor of Chinese literature. During the 1980s, he played a pivotal role as one of the pioneering figures in the xinyao movement, which celebrated Singaporean Chinese folk songs. He has received numerous awards across diverse artistic genres, including the prestigious Singapore Cultural Medallion. With a prolific body of work, he boasts over twenty publications spanning various creative genres and an impressive repertoire of more than three hundred songs. Widely recognised for his ability to blend literature and music, his works have left an indelible mark on Singapore's vibrant art scene.

About the Translator:

Christina Ng is a Singaporean writer, journalist and translator based in Berlin. Her Chinese to English translations include poetry by Singaporean poets Liang Wern Fook, Ting Kheng Siong, Dan Ying and Chinese poet Hua Qing.

This Vietnamese drama/play written in verse depicts the history of Trung Träc (Zheng Ce) - later known as Queen TRUNG - and her sister's armed revolt against the Chinese Han Dynasty in the year 40 A.D., during its second invasion of Giao Chi (Jiaozhi). Giao Chi is now a part of northern Vietnam.

The Hậu Hán sử (Hou Han Shu) recorded that Trưng's rebellion would liberate Giao Chi (Jiaozhi) and avenge the murder of her patriot husband Thi Sach (Shi Suo) by To Dinh (Su Ting), a brutal and ruthless Chinese governor.

In 42 A.D., Han China dispatched General Mã Viện (Ma Yuan) to quell the rebellion. In 43 A.D., the Han army defeated the Trưng sisters and regained complete control of Giao Chi. According to Vietnamese chronicles, the two sisters drowned themselves in the river rather than surrender to the Han.

The author has included a brief introduction before each act to help English readers better follow the play. The English version is a literal translation - not an adaptation of the original Vietnamese version - and therefore, is not regarded as an English drama play in verse.

(About the Author)

Quang Hong Mac, a captain in the South Vietnam Army (ARVN) and an injured pilot in the 1968 Tet offensive battle, was imprisoned for five years after Saigon fell in 1975. In 1980, he escaped and resettled in the United States. The following year, his wife and three children came to a Malaysia refugee camp. They reunited in 1981. The author rebuilt his life from zero, graduating as an electrical engineer. Now retired, he was editor of Philadelphia Rạng Đông Sunrise magazine and was an adviser on Asia to Pennsylvania's governor. He has never returned to Vietnam.

Toxic Spirits is a highly atmospheric thriller set in Thailand, a playground for colorful expats, gorgeous women and limitless skullduggery. Narrated with insightful meditations on nature and biodiversity, interspersed with macabre violence and dark hilarity, the novel is also a brilliant, genetics-inspired take on multiculturalism and personal identity.

Benton, a widowed African-American intelligence analyst from Washington, retires to Thailand. At an expat bar, he is captivated by Siri, a beautiful tribal singer. When Siri disappears, he discovers that she had been speaking out about the side-effects from drug trials conducted on her hill-tribe. Benton's investigations draw him uncomfortably close to Pierre, the seriously disturbed Indo-Cambodian doctor running the trials. Becoming an unwilling guinea-pig in the trials, Benton is transformed by the genetically-engineered drugs and falls in love with Mimi, a stunning and gifted young Thai-Australian muay thai boxer. As the genetic manipulations spiral out of control, spreading to the botanical treasures of Thailand's Golden Triangle, the forces of tribal healing, high-tech medicine, and love battle to determine who will survive.