250 Novels

You have been chosen to make one of three choices by 22 January 2011. Simply click on the voting buttons for one of these novels below.  The Novel with the most votes will win.

The first is Tash Aw’s “The Harmony Silk Factory” (2005…) which made the Man Booker Prize long list, and won a Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award, making it one of the most celebrated literary debuts since Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” in 2000. Doris Lessing was reported to describe Aw’s novel as ‘unputdownable.’ Tash Aw was born in Taiwan and grew up in KL and is inspired by Faulkner, Nabakov, Conrad and Flaubert. In essence The Harmony Silk Factory is a story about the telling of stories.

The second is Timothy Mo’s “An Insular Possession” (1986) also shortlisted for the Booker. Elaine Ho stated that this Novel “resonates of Virgil’s epic on the origins of Rome.” (not sure what Rome has to do with HK). Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong in 1950 to a Cantonese father and an English mother. He was educated in Hong Kong and the UK. After graduating from St John’s College, Oxford, he worked as a journalist for the New Statesman and Boxing News. His writing reflects both his Anglo-Chinese background and his concerns for the effects of imperialism and colonial rule in South-East Asia. The Novel is set during the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the first half of the nineteenth century and brings to light the way both cultures despise each other.

The third is Yu Hua’s “To Live” (1994) which had a film version by Zhang Yimou banned by the Chinese authorities (a better accolade than any Booker list). Yu Hua was born in Hangzhou. To Live, his second novel is an epic spanning four decades of recent Chinese history. It begins in the 1930s around the time of China’s second war with Japan and continues into the late 1970s reform era. In between, Hua weaves great sorrow and struggle for Fugui and his family through the tempestuous Chinese Civil War, The Great Leap Forward, and The Cultural Revolution.

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