Book description
Mingzhi is the formidable Master Chai's first grandson and groomed for
a grand destiny from the very moment of his birth. But while Master Chai
beats out orders with his dragon stick, there are threats to the future
he has planned - from both within and without. Inside the mansion, there
are secrets, lies, and plots; in the surrounding fields, there is the
newly planted opium that signifies trouble ahead; and, further away,
still, the foreign devils, intent on taking their own piece of the pie
that is China. 'Like a good Chinese drawing but always in motion . . .
with the same breadth of scope and wealth of characters as many great
nineteenth-century novels' ALASDAIR GRAY, TLS 'Chiew-Siah Tei is a
master storyteller, and a rare talent, with that magical ability of
being able to weave a spell over her readers, with riveting plots and
prose that glows with life' Time Out HK
Chiew-Siah Tei was born and raised in Tampin, a small town in
southern Malaysia. A bilingual writer, she has won a series of awards
for her Chinese prose, including the Hua Zong International Chinese
Fiction Award. She wrote the script for Night Swimmer, which
won Best Short Film at the Vendome International Film Festival, and
her play, Three Thousand Troubled Threads, was staged at the
Edinburgh International Festival. She came to the UK to study in the
1990s, and now lives in Glasgow. Little Hut of Leaping Fishes
is her first novel, and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary
Prize 2007.
