Whispers At The Pagoda

This text aims to provide insights into the daily lives of people of the traumatized and often forgotten land of Burma, through personal contacts over a wide range of Burmese society, in urban centres, monasteries and hilltribe villages.

This is the first of two semi-autobiographical novels written originally in English which depict Chang's childhood years in Tianjin and Shanghai. The book introduces a young girl growing up amid many family entanglements with her divorced mother and spinster aunt during the 1930s.

The Beijing Ripper makes a personal vendetta against Detective Li Yan in the thrilling final episode of the series... GRUESOME MURDERS His victims are young, beautiful and coldly mutilated. He calls himself the Beijing Ripper. Li Yan, head of Beijing's serious crime squad, must stop him. FEARSOME LETTERS Just as pathologist Margaret Campbell finds an insight into the killer's cruel signature, Li receives a letter from the killer, betraying his cruel intentions. CHINESE WHISPERS There's no way Li can misinterpret the Ripper's motives: he wants to tear Li and Campbell's lives apart, and write the darkest chapter in Beijing's history.

Young Cape Cod public defender and commercial fisherman Michael Decastro ventures to Saigon with his father, a Vietnam War vet, to come to the aid of his long-lost client and love-interest Tuki Aparecio. The half-Vietnamese, half-African American diva is in a fight of her life with a mysterious dragon lady from Indochina's underworld. At stake is an antique ruby in Tuki's possession...and the mortal souls of everyone Decastro loves. Ghosts that the Decastros and Tuki carry with them from Cape Cod and Southeast Asia will have their day.

China has fascinated the imagination of the West for centuries. The story of chinoiserie in Britain is

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • What if you lived out the drama of your twenties on Air Force One? “[This] breezy page turner is essentially Bridget Jones goes to the White House.”—The New York Times RECOMMENDED READING theSkimm • Today • Entertainment Weekly • Refinery29 • Bustle • PopSugar • Vanity Fair • The New York Times Editors’ Choice • Paste In 2012, Beck Dorey-Stein is working five part-time jobs and just scraping by when a posting on Craigslist lands her, improbably, in the Oval Office as one of Barack Obama’s stenographers. The ultimate D.C. outsider, she joins the elite team who accompany the president wherever he goes, recorder and mic in hand. On whirlwind trips across time zones, Beck forges friendships with a dynamic group of fellow travelers—young men and women who, like her, leave their real lives behind to hop aboard Air Force One in service of the president. As she learns to navigate White House protocols and more than once runs afoul of the hierarchy, Beck becomes romantically entangled with a consummate D.C. insider, and suddenly the political becomes all too personal. Against a backdrop of glamour, drama, and intrigue, this is the story of a young woman learning what truly matters, and, in the process, discovering her voice. Praise for From the Corner of the Oval “Who knew the West Wing could be so sexy? Beck Dorey-Stein’s unparalleled access is obvious on every page, along with her knife-sharp humor. I tore through the entire book on a four-hour flight and loved reading all about the brilliant yet hard-partying people who once surrounded the leader of the free world. Lots of books claim to give real insider glimpses, but this one actually delivers.”—Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada “Dorey-Stein . . . writes with wit and self-deprecating humor.”—The Wall Street Journal “Addictively readable . . . Dorey-Stein’s spunk and her sparkling, crackling prose had me cheering for her through each adventure. . . . She never loses her starry-eyed optimism, her pinch-me wonderment, her Working Girl pluck.”—Paul Begala, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

Compelling images of cinnamon-robed monks confronting the guns and clubs of Burma's military junta outraged the world in September 2007. Then communications links were cut, and curfews, interrogations, midnight raids, beatings, and arrests crushed the remnants of defiance. Tragically, it had all happened before. No Time for Dreams narrates a remarkable woman's search over four decades for independence and purpose as repression spreads throughout her country, once known as the Golden Land. Inspired by the legacy of her father, Ba Tin's struggle against British colonialism beginning in the 1930s, San San Tin infuses her journey from school girl to journalist and, briefly, to businesswoman with an unbroken spirit of resistance. Offering a compassionate insider's view of politics, culture, religion, and family during nearly half a century of unrelenting dictatorship, this riveting personal story traces an arc of decline to reveal the bitter fate of a once-prosperous and cosmopolitan society.

The Guardian's Best Books of 2015 Most people suppose that the whole world knows what it is to love; that romantic love is universal, quintessentially human. Such a supposition has to be able to meet three challenges. It has to justify its underlying assumption that all cultures mean the same thing by the word ‘love’ regardless of language. It has to engage with the scholarly debate on whether or not romantic love was invented in Europe and is uniquely Western. And it must be able to explain why early twentieth-century Chinese writers claimed that they had never known true love, or love by modern Western standards. By addressing these three challenges through a literary, historical, philosophical, biographical and above all comparative approach, this highly original work shows how love’s profile in China shifted with the rejection of arranged marriages and concubinage in favour of free individual choice, monogamy and a Western model of romantic love. ‘This book, Lynn Pan’s best to date, adds a wonderful new angle by encouraging us, via comparison, to better appreciate how unusual, even in some ways exotic, a part of the Western past we take for granted, as though it were natural, actually is. While the reader will learn a great deal about Chinese literary and cultural traditions from this book, if read with an open mind the Western reader may end up rethinking things about his or her tradition just as deeply.’ —Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History, University of California at Irvine ‘Nobody writes about China quite as brilliantly as Lynn Pan, who in this new, illuminating work on love showcases her trademark erudition entwined with a novelist’s sensibility. Pan’s rare skill makes the book a treat from start to finish; a sumptuous, deft and moving analysis of China’s relationship with love.’ —Mishi Saran, author of Chasing the Monk’s Shadow: A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang and The Other Side of Light