It's January 1932 and Shanghai is about to explode. Private detective Jack Ford doesn't think things can get much worse, and then a young woman looking for a missing brother walks into his life. The search takes him from swank hotels and clubs through cabarets, back streets, and brothels, to the living hell of an urban battlefield. Rich and the poor, East and West, Chinese patriots and gangsters, Japanese militarists and thugs... A city of lost souls.

A bullet-riddled train staggers into a Chinese station in 1920, and Lucy discovers that her father, a Russian officer, has been kidnapped. A mysterious feather guides her into a dangerous realm of magic and monsters to rescue him. But she knows she can't take on the quest alone. With her friend Su, a girl as quick with words as with her fists, the two uncover the terrifying truth: a notorious warlord has seized Lucy's father. Worse, he is about to invade their city. The friends brave the criminal underworld, cross a haunted forest, and outsmart creatures they thought lived only in fairytales. But will their wits and bravery be enough to beat the warlord's army of human soldiers and magical beasts?

Soar into a grand adventure, a world of Chinese and Slavic myths ... into the world of The Phoenix and the Firebird.

One evening in his early teens as his family sat around the dining table, Mark O'Neill's father suddenly dropped his English accent and spoke for the first time in his original and long hidden Irish voice. It was the start of an Irish journey for Mark that has lasted a lifetime, taking him through Scotland, to Belfast as a reporter during the Troubles in the 1970s, and from 1978, to the Far East where he continued his search for the meaning of Irishness.

In Hong Kong, China and Japan, Mark discovered deep Irish footprints - missionaries, doctors, judges, lawyers, authors and jockeys. Two Irish nuns cured Hong Kong of tuberculosis, an Irish bandmaster wrote the music for Japan's national anthem and a nun taught English and Gaelic to the future Empress Michiko of Japan. Mark followed the footsteps of his grandfather, a Presbyterian missionary who lived in a small town in northeast China for 45 years. He was delighted to find still standing the church his grandfather had built, with a minister and her congregation happy to welcome him.

Since 1800, no country in Europe has lost as many of its citizens to emigration as Ireland. From the 19th century, the Irish started to come to Asia, and now the Chinese are going to Ireland - including Hazel Chu, elected Lord Mayor of Dublin in 2020, as well as one of Ireland's most famous celebrity chefs and any number of IT wizards. This is a remarkable account of the Irish diaspora, touchingly personal, full of humour, anecdotes and insights.

Hokkaido: A History of Japan's Northern Isle and its People charts the journey of the island and its inhabitants through history. Located at the far north of the country's island chain, Hokkaido is a very different place from Japan's other main islands and is the center of the culture and history of Japan's indigenous people, the Ainu. This book tells the unique story of the Ainu as well as exploring the unique role Hokkaido has played in the development of modern Japan. It looks at the challenges the Ainu faced through the past few centuries, and still to some extent continue to face today. It explores the incredible stories of contacts with outsiders, both settlers from the south and Russians from the north. It gives details of the unique Ainu experience during the Second World War, and how Ainu activists and Japanese reconciliation has claimed a place for the Ainu in Japanese society today. There is also a parallel history to Hokkaido, that of the Japanese settlers from samurai in the 16th century through to the island's development in the 19th Century and beyond. With the opening of Japan to foreign nations, Hokkaido became a key focus for Japan's interactions with the wider world, a melting pot, a frontier of opportunity and a symbol of the rising tide of modernization that would change the face of Japan forever. This book is filled with revelations and formerly little-known stories from a distant, yet important corner of Japan. It is the ideal introduction to the history of Hokkaido and the Ainu, including materials translated into English for the first time from Japanese.

The Yangtze River is the key artery through China's heartland, and through the early decades of the 20th Century, the biggest ships on the river were all skippered by foreign sailors like Peter Mender. As a captain for the American company Standard Oil, he faced wars and natural disasters as he guided oil tankers up and down the river for close to thirty years, before his last ship was sunk by the Japanese in their assault on China's capital of Nanking in 1937. This memoir is an invaluable window into the chaos of China in those years from a unique perspective.

Traditional Chinese culture rests upon the shoulders of three great sages, Confucius, the Buddha, and Lao Tzu. The last of these is the most mysterious and least-known of the heavenly trio. Love Becomes Her depicts this legendary figure in search of a soulmate, only to find her in the form of a baby from an island of giants.

A novel of magical realism in the vein of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Isabel Allende, this a tale of passion, persistence and triumph. Set alternately in modern China's era of economic and social transformation and in the ancient dynasty that birthed one of the world's great philosophies, Love Becomes Her entrances and enchants as a fable for the ages.

The World's first Chinese-Jewish Historical Fantasy.

The Tang Monk Xuanzang along with Monkey and Pigsy famously brought the Buddhist scriptures back to China. Now the trio go on a new adventure to get the Hebrew Scriptures. The strongman Bear joins them as they face new monsters and new challenges, and finally reach a land filled with hundreds of foreign sages, yet only one god. The search for a teacher willing to come back to China is difficult, but a talking donkey helps solve the problem.

A fresh parable linking the Chinese classic story with the worlds of Western Asia and Roman Palestine, The Second Journey brings together the cultures, myths and philosophies of all Asia.

Shalama is a Russian Jewish girl, born in 1928 in the Chinese city of Harbin, whose life tracks one of the great rescues and rebirths of the 20th century - the move of Jewish people from Europe to Harbin, then on to Shanghai and eventually the United States. Harbin was a remote town close to the Russian border which in a few years had changed from a fishing village into a sophisticated European city thanks to an influx of Jews escaping pogroms and White Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks. Many thousands, including Shalama's parents, crowded into the city and many of them prospered. But the Japanese occupied Harbin in the 1930s, and at twelve years old, Shalama and her family moved southwards to the international port city of Shanghai. There, Shalama went to the Shanghai Jewish School, became a typist, changed her name to Shirley, met and married an Austrian Jew named Paul Hoffmann and remade her life.

Told in story form by Shirley's daughter, Shalama is a moving epic that captures the feel of those dangerous times when the world had lost its moorings. After the family's escape from Shanghai, after the Communist takeover, Paul and Shirley moved to the United States, but towards the end of her life, an unexpected turn of events brought both enlightenment and closure to questions that had remained a mystery throughout her lifetime.

The Tang Dynasty (618 to 907 AD) is considered to be China's Golden Age of Poetry, and My China in Tang Poetry is a personal celebration of the genius of the Tang poets by writer, teacher and translator Susan Wan Dolling. She provides a feast of new translations of the poems, accompanying them with explanations of the meaning and context of each with an unparalleled depth of knowledge and understanding, as well as an enthusiasm that is infectious. To her, the poems are not only the epitome of culture and art, but also a store of stories and images that remains relevant today.

Volume One, Superstars, selections from the two giants of Tang poetry, Li Bai, aka Li Po, and Du Fu, aka Tu Fu. These new translations of their poems are arranged thematically, with historical background, allusions, and this translator's readings imbedded into the stories they tell.

Shanghai in the 1930s was one of the world's most dangerous cities, with kidnappings and murders daily occurrences. British police officer E.W. Peters of the Shanghai Municipal Police takes us down the city's dark lanes and alleys, through a crime-ridden underworld of brothels, opium dens and gambling parlors. This often riotous, true-crime chronicle is filled with colorful criminals, fumbled police raids and gross misunderstandings, one of which lands the author on trial for murder. A must-read for those interested in old Shanghai at its most exciting.

15-year-old Emma Chan is an aspiring musician with her eyes aimed at the stars. Sure, she might not have won any notable competitions, but she isn't bad by any means-unless you've met her easygoing and charming best friend, Naomi Lin, who seems to have the unique ability to accelerate Emma's heartbeat.

On the surface, Naomi has her life together. Outside of being dubbed a child musical prodigy, she's just another 15-year-old who likes coding, spending time with her friends, and reading celebrity gossip. But deep down, she longs to escape her life of expectations and build one that she truly desires, even if she doesn't know what that means yet.

When the two friends team up to compete in a coding contest hosted by their childhood idol, their seven years worth of friendship is jeopardized by deepening feelings, desperately hidden secrets, and the pressure of growing up. Emma and Naomi will have to adapt to the changing shape of their relationship, even if it means realizing that life can be so much more complicated than they imagined.

Westerners are flocking to China in increasing numbers to chase their dreams even as Chinese emigrants seek their own dreams abroad. Life as an outsider in China has many sides to it - weird, fascinating and appalling, or sometimes all together. We asked foreigners who live or have lived in China for a significant period to tell us a story of their experiences and these 28 contributions resulted. It's all about living, learning and loving in a land unlike any other in the world.

Isabella Bird was greatest travel writer of the late 19th century and this is her master work - an account of a journey in 1897 from Shanghai, up the Yangtze River, through the Gorges, overland to Chengdu, then up into the mountains of eastern Tibet. She almost died twice in riots along the way, which she admits she found annoying. This is a lively and remarkable picture of China at the brink of huge changes, by a smart and sympathetic observer.

Diplomat, lawyer, judge, soldier, spy, spymaster - just some of the positions American Norwood Allman, held in his 30 plus years in China. Shanghai Lawyer is Allman's first-hand account of his amazing life, from his arrival as a student interpreter during WWI, to serving as a Chinese and Mexican judge, practising before the U.S. Court for China, commanding the American militia in Shanghai, and, finally fighting the Japanese army in the battle for Hong Kong in 1941.

On the rainy afternoon of November 28,1938, a slight 18-year-old Austrian man took in his first impressions of Shanghai. Paul Hoffmann had left his family and all that was familiar to him in Vienna and was now among a forlorn stream of thousands of Jewish refugees into China to escape Nazism. For the next thirteen years, Shanghai would be his home, and he made the most of the last years of the foreign-dominated world of old Shanghai. Witness to History is the moving memoir of a man caught up in the tides of history, who witnessed and experienced the Nazi revolution in Europe, the Japanese invasion of China and the Communist victory in China in 1949, and emerged from the challenges all the wiser. In Shanghai, he taught mathematics, lived the high life, and worked for an American lawyer, Norwood Altman, who was also secretly the US spy chief in China before and after the Communist takeover.

While many Chinese women seek men of means to love and protect them, Jade Bai, a former nurse turned HR professional, unknowingly marries into an influential government family. Her father-in-law, Zhengting Dai, is a top minister in a big city - generous and modest and implacable in his refusal to accept envelopes to curry favor.

As she begins her new job with a multinational company, Jade falls pregnant, but her father-in law's rigid principles jeopardize the safety of her unborn baby. He has to face the possibility that being purer than driven snow sometimes helps no one. Meanwhile, Jade's coworkers uncover widespread graft that could endanger them all.

Will getting rid of the crooked ones stop the evils?

The Envelopes is a provocative story of how far love and devotion can go in the eternal struggle between good and evil.

It is 1983 and we are in Beijing. China has just started to re-open to Western trade after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. A young Englishman finds himself caught in a dilemma: will his desire for a Chinese girl make him willing to source forbidden technology for her father? And will their relationship be used to lure him into espionage? In this part-love story, part-thriller, Chris Ruffle reveals a China now vanished beneath the veneer of modernization.

Born in Shanghai to Russian Jewish parents who fled the Bolshevik Revolution, Liliane Willens is a stateless girl in the world's most cosmopolitan city. But when the Far East explodes in conflict, the family's uncertain status puts them at risk of being stranded, or worse. Stateless in Shanghai recounts Willens' life and trials in a China collapsing under the weight of foreign invaders and civil war.

Discover the ancient wisdom of Chinese Tao and how it applies to modern business with this fresh, uncomplicated guide. German Tao expert Ansgar Gerstner explains how to make use of the timeless principles of the Tao Te Ching, providing a unique insight to the challenges of contemporary business and the forces of human nature that underpin them.

American socialite Ruth Day visited Shanghai for several weeks in 1935 and left one of the most sparkling descriptions of the city in this book, published in a limited edition the following year and only brought to the wider world in this new edition published more than 80 years later. Ruth was the step-daughter of a prominent American financial expert who held a senior post in the Chinese government, and during her whirlwind trip, she met with absolutely everyone who was anyone, and went everywhere the high-society crowd frequented - dancehalls and night-clubs, parties and the best private homes. She describes it all with a rare flair, leaving us with a valuable and unique record of Shanghai high society and the panorama of human experience in the city during its decadent heyday. This is truly a lost classic brought back to life.