Showing results by narrator "Daniel York" in All Categories

Award-winning historian Frank Dikötter explores how the People’s Republic of China was transformed from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today. His account is the first to be based on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents, from the secret minutes of top party meetings to confidential bank reports. Unfolding with great narrative sweep, this riveting, richly detailed chronicle recasts our understanding of an era that both the regime and foreign admirers celebrate as an economic miracle.

In the fourth and final volume of Legends of the Condor Heroes, the first novel in the Condor Trilogy, Guo Jing is at last forced to make a choice between loyalty to the land of his birth and keeping faith with Genghis Khan, who has been like a father to him. As the Mongol armies descend on China, Jin Yong brings this most beloved of his books to a thrilling conclusion, complete with vast battles, stirring heroism, heartbreak, triumph and loss.

As North Korea's State Poet Laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life.

In the Jin capital of Zhongdu, Guo Jing learns the truth of his father’s death and finds he is now betrothed, against his will, to two women. Neither of them is his sweetheart Lotus Huang. Torn between following his heart and fulfilling his filial duty, Guo Jing journeys through the country of his parents with Lotus, encountering mysterious martial heroes and becoming drawn into the struggle for the supreme martial text, the Nine Yin Manual. But his past is catching up with him.

China: 1200 AD. Guo Jing has confronted Apothecary Huang, his sweetheart Lotus' father, on Peach Blossom Island, and bested the villainous Gallant Ouyang in three trials to win her hand in marriage. But now, along with his sworn brother, Zhou Botong of the Quanzhen Sect, and his shifu, Count Seven Hong, chief of the Beggar Clan, he has walked into a trap. Tricked by Huang into boarding an unseaworthy barge, they will surely drown unless Lotus - who has overheard her father's plans - can find a way to save them.

After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.

Following the lives of military intelligence officer Jie and his wife Moon, The Book of Secrets weaves recently found material into a narrative that not only illuminates the shadowy world of intelligence in China, but also the emotional tragedies that political extremism inflicted on those working within. Drawing on Jie’s own vivid biography of his youth, Xinran pieces together his trajectory as he joins the great hope of the Chinese young – the Communist Party – and becomes a loyal cadre until the late 1970s.

Dear Leader contains astonishing new insights about North Korea which could only be revealed by someone working high up in the regime. It is also the gripping story of how a member of the inner circle of this enigmatic country became its most courageous, outspoken critic. Jang Jin-sung held one of the most senior ranks in North Korea's propaganda machine, helping tighten the regime's grip over its people.

When a Navy vessel comes across a yacht in distress in the middle of the vast Indian Ocean, Captain Danial Tengku orders his ship to rush to its aid. On board the yacht is a British couple: a horribly injured man, Jake, and his traumatized wife, Virginie, who breathlessly confesses, “It’s all my fault. I killed them.” Trembling with fear, she reveals their shocking story to Danial.

This celebration of Chinese science fiction - 13 stories, all translated for the first time into English - represents a unique exploration of the nation's speculative fiction from the late 20th century onwards, curated and translated by critically acclaimed writer and essayist Xueting Christine Ni. 

An apocalyptic cult member carries out a gas attack on a rush-hour metro, but what links him to a jazz buff in downtown Tokyo? Or to a Mongolian gangster, a woman on a holy mountain who talks to a tree and a late night New York DJ? Set at the fugitive edges of Asia and Europe, Ghostwritten weaves together a host of characters, their interconnected destinies determined by the inescapable forces of cause and effect.

After the death of 'Eumenides', a former police student who was sending 'death notices' to unpunished criminals before brutally murdering them, the Chengdu Police Department assumed that the killing spree would stop. But the murders continue, leading the 4/18 task force to the terrifying truth: Eumenides had a protégé. Captain Pei Tao and his task force redouble their efforts to catch this new opponent, but relationships become fraught. Can they trust each other?

In this dispatch from exile, Hong Kong political activist Nathan Law explores the meaning of freedom - and shows how easily freedoms can be eroded or dismantled. Freedom is fragile - it is not a given, and each generation must fight to protect it, whether in emerging democracies or in the Western world, where freedom is too often taken for granted.

One small island, six troubled lives and the storm of the century is on its way. In one of the world's most vibrant international cities, present day Hong Kong, the lives of six people become irreversibly intertwined. The past is catching up with those running from it, while the futures of others hangs dangerously in the balance. But who knows the most? And what will they do to get it?

In the Jin capital of Zhongdu, Guo Jing learns the truth of his father's death and finds he is now betrothed, against his will, to two women. Neither of them is his sweetheart, Lotus Huang. Torn between following his heart and fulfilling his filial duty, he journeys through the country of his parents with Lotus, encountering mysterious martial heroes and becoming drawn into the struggle for the supreme martial text, the Nine Yin Manual. But his past is catching up with him. The widow of an evil man he accidentally killed as a child has tracked him down, intent on revenge.

The rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule are told with unique insight in this new history by Michael Sheridan, drawing on eyewitness reporting over three decades, interviews with key figures and documents from archives in China and the West. The story sweeps the listener from the earliest days of trade through the Opium Wars of the 19th century to the age of globalisation, the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, the battle for democracy on the city’s streets and the ultimate victory of the Chinese Communist Party.

The power, anger and fluency of Liang Qichao's writings make him one of the towering figures in modern Chinese literature. He saw his great, almost unmanageable task as an attempt to write China into the new era - to provide an ancient country, devastated by civil war and foreign predators, with the intellectual equipment to renew itself. This selection of pieces shows Liang's extraordinary range and the burning sense of mission which drove him on, attempting to galvanize and refresh an entire nation.

In the fourth and final volume of Legends of the Condor Heroes, the first novel in the Condor Trilogy, Guo Jing is at last forced to make a choice between loyalty to the land of his birth and keeping faith with Genghis Khan, who has been like a father to him. As the Mongol armies descend on China, Jin Yong brings this most beloved of his novels to a thrilling conclusion, complete with vast battles, stirring heroism, heartbreak, triumph and loss.

Nobel Peace Prize nominee Nathan Law has experienced first-hand the shocking speed with which our freedom can be taken away from us, as an elected politician arrested simply for speaking his mind. He remembers what it is like to lack freedom - and his father's precarious three-day escape from China in a small rowing boat. In this passionate rallying cry, Law argues that we must defend our freedom now or face losing it for ever.

As Eiji Miyake's 20th birthday nears, he arrives in Tokyo with a mission - to locate the father he has never met. So begins a search that takes him into the seething city's underworld, its lost property offices and video arcades, and on a journey that zigzags from reality to the realm of dreams. But until Eiji has fallen in love and exorcised his childhood demons, the belonging he craves will remain, tantalizingly, just beyond his grasp.