K: The Art of Love

Written with a wonderfully intense simplicity - it's tough, uncompromising, direct and tense with strong emotion, but also full of poetry and grace

Hong Ying was born into a sailor's family in Chongqing on the Yangtze River in Southwest China. An author and poet, she began her career as a full-time writer in the early 1980s having studied creative writing at Lu Xun Creative Writing Academy and Fudan University. 
 
She is best known in the English-speaking world for her novels: K: The Art of Love (which won the Prix de Rome in 2005), The Concubine of Shanghai, Peacock Cries and Summer of Betrayal. Her autobiography, Daughter of the River, has been translated into twenty-nine languages and many of her works have been turned into television series and films. Her latest memoir, Good Children of the Flowers, a sequel to Daughter of the River, won Asia Weekly's Top Ten Books of the Year Award 2009. She lives in Beijing with her husband and daughter.

China, 1930s. Julian Bell, son of the Bloomsbury set's Vanessa, is newly arrived in Peking. In search of fresh experiences, he encounters the beautiful, intelligent and deeply erotic Lin Cheng. Though Lin is wife to a university professor, their passionate assignations blossom into an affair. 
 
Schooled in the ancient Taoist arts of love, Lin instructs Julian in the ways of the East. But if society won't tolerate this union between Occidental and Oriental can their love possibly survive? 
 
Based on a true story this is a tragic tale of romance, betrayal and sexual desire set against a backdrop of conflict and war.

Hong Ying

A fascinating, full-blooded yarn which has the reader rooting for its heroine, a kind of Chinese Moll Flanders, every inch of the way

China, 1907. Sixteen-year-old orphan Cassia is sold by her aunt to a brothel. There, she works as a lowly maid for Madame Emerald until a powerful and dangerous client plucks her from obscurity. 
 
Master Chang is the boss of the fearsome Shanghai Triad and he always gets what he wants. Despite her unbound feet and breasts, Cassia swiftly becomes Chang's favourite mistress. He showers her with luxuries as he embarks on her sexual awakening. 
 
But Chang's world is violent and precarious, and those such as Cassia who depend on him are bound to his fate . . .

The Concubine of Shanghai

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Hong Ying

Praise for The Concubine of Shanghai

A brilliant and sensitive writer

A fascinating, full-blooded yarn which has the reader rooting for its heroine, a kind of Chinese Moll Flanders, every inch of the way

A beautiful and gripping writer

A brilliant and sensitive writer

A fascinating, full-blooded yarn which has the reader rooting for its heroine, a kind of Chinese Moll Flanders, every inch of the way

A beautiful and gripping writer

A brilliant and sensitive writer

A fascinating, full-blooded yarn which has the reader rooting for its heroine, a kind of Chinese Moll Flanders, every inch of the way

A beautiful and gripping writer

Books by Hong Ying

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