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Mountain Songs embodies the intersecting narratives of migration and how it shapes one’s identity.Mountain songs (山歌) are integral to Hakka culture – Tegan Smyth’s maternal heritage – and have been a way to keep stories by unknown authors alive in an oral tradition. As Hakka’s prominence as a spoken language gives way to other more widely spoken dialects of Chinese, it is in careful records that the cultural practices and stories are captured so they can be seen by future generations. This is true of the poems contained in Mountain Songs, which focuses on the accounts of different women in the writer’s family, whose existence and memories have been passed down only orally and never in writing. The movement of mountain songs sung across different terrains and milieus mirrors the movement of Hakka people themselves, a widely dispersed people, where migration is tied to the community’s experiences both within and outside China. The writer draws parallels to the migration of her grandparen

Told through a little girl’s keen and often amused observation, AN INCH OF TIME gives a truthful, pleasant picture of daily life in Hong Kong in the post-war years. This first-hand account of the kind of home and school education received by many middle-class local Hong Kong children decades ago contains reminiscences about aspects of life-style, customs and traditions – both eastern and western – which average Hongkongers lived by in the 1940s and ‘50s. This memoir is set in a specific locality, the Happy Valley district of Hong Kong Island, home for over a century to the famous Jockey Club race-course.

South of the Yangtze starts with the protagonist, Qian Yinan, taking the high-speed train through the landscape of Jiangnan (“South of the Yangtze River”) with her American husband. Now in her mid-thirties, Yinan recalls her first trip along the same route in the late 1980s, as well as her Shanghai childhood with her “historical counter-revolutionary” grandfather, semi-literate grandmother, philosophy professor father and former “red guard” mother. Later in school, while receiving a nationalist education and witnessing the booming market economy, she becomes close to Jie, a classmate who aspires to join the Communist Party. And a few months before the new millennium, Yinan finds herself trapped in a secret love affair with her Mandarin-speaking high school teacher, who was once an activist during the political turmoil of 1989. In the midst of these formative relationships, Yinan contemplates the impact of the nation’s ideology, tradition and even it

VERA MAGPIE explores the gap between childhood fantasies of adult life and the stark reality of life in a women's prison. The eponymous narrator, Vera Magpie herself, is serving time for the murder of her three husbands, including Larry, a good man whom she loved, but doomed to die at Vera's hands because she has acquired a taste for murder. In prison, Vera experiences the reality that here are politics and a pecking order, just as in society at large, but here also she finds redemption through literature. Like many women who kill, Vera is a product of her own flawed past. But aspects of this past also count towards her early release from prison, as her new female lawyer successfully argues Battered Women’s Syndrome as a defence.-------------------------------------------------“Vera Magpie depicts pure life, nothing has been included or excluded, only human attitudes, psychology and behaviours have been condensed.”—Muhammad Shanazar “A knockout. This book is a little gem.”—J

The objectives of this book, The Year of the Apparitions, can be summed up in one word, survival. The survival game is hard for everyone. In my case, the stories that poetry and theatre can tell are l