In Daughter of the Moon Goddess, Sue Lynn Tan imagines the goddess Chang’e has a daughter, Silver Star. She talks about the long road to publication of her first novel, and how Hong Kong inspires her writing.

From Shakespeare to C.S. Lewis, one reader discovered that despite avoiding any novel that shaped his experience of the pandemic, his experience was shaping the novels he was reading.

Need a break from the usual holiday headaches? Then take a look at our alternative 12 days of Christmas – a historical hodgepodge of festive feats, fails and foul plays.

Identity was on Shelley Parker-Chan’s mind growing up, and it looms large in her brilliant debut novel, She Who Became The Sun. Set in 14th century China, it’s a love letter to Chinese television dramas.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave returns to children’s fiction with this story of a summer holiday in a lighthouse that turns very dark.

The idea of revival and recovery takes centre stage at the 2021 Hong Kong International Literary Festival, whose programme is organised around themes of wellness, community and trauma.

The Sisters Mao by Irish novelist Gavin McCrea interweaves the experiences of Mao Zedong’s actress wife with that of two thespian sisters in 1968 London. He explains what drew him to Jiang Qing’s story.

Fiction or non-fiction, we have the pick of the best books to read this summer, whether you’re on a beach or in lockdown waiting for the pandemic to end.

Rushdie’s second non-fiction anthology, Languages of Truth picks up where Step Across This Line left off in 2002 and is every bit as pleasurable as its predecessor.

Hard Like Water’s hero is bent on vengeance almost from birth, and the Cultural Revolution gives him his opportunity. He seeks something else too, and finds it in his sexual infatuation with a lover.

Jonathan Kos-Read – aka Cao Cao – would have had no trouble drawing on his experiences navigating China’s film industry to evoke the treacherous atmosphere of Jin dynasty hierarchy in The Eunuch.

Sue Cheung’s humorous book Chinglish has received critical acclaim, but writing it meant revisiting the often unpleasant experience of growing up in her family’s Chinese takeaway in the UK, and the brutal violence meted out by her otherwise uncommunicative father.

For journalist Te-Ping Chen, getting to grips with a country the size of China meant looking at the small stuff – which she does in her first short story collection.

Literature Live Around the World kicks off the Year of the Ox with 12 hours of readings and conversations about books, featuring authors from Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida to Karl Ove Knausgard.

Christmas is a time of goodwill to all men and their often bizarre traditions, whether it’s a gift-defecating log or a festive fist-fight. We hitch a ride on the big man’s sleigh to see for ourselves.

If the trend for Gothic novels reflected the revolutions of the era, what does our appetite for psychological thrillers say about the fears and complex reality of the 21st century?

In the Covid-19 era even classic Christmas stories, such as Dickens’ three seasonal tales, take on new connotations.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, American-Chinese author C Pam Zhang’s novel takes a timely look at racism in the US through the eyes of two Chinese orphans.

Sinologist and ‘global historian’ Jeffrey Wasserstrom, who bore witness to the anger and utopia of Occupy Central in 2014 and last year’s Hong Kong protests, makes just one prediction: that he is unlikely to visit China again.

English exposed the vulnerabilities of the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s parents while Italian gave her ‘a real and new sense of quiet’.

As author Noreena Hertz explains in The Lonely Century the epidemic of loneliness has been in the making for 40 years as individualism grew while community faded.

Believe it or not, the Bible is chock full of sartorial advice and there is more to fashion fiction than the frivolity of Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series.

Nigel Ng, the Malaysian stand-up comedian behind a viral video in which he reacts to a BBC guide to how to make egg fried rice, could not have predicted how popular his comedy sketch would be.

Set in China’s Weihsien internment camp, Hazel Gaynor’s latest book, The Bird in the Bamboo cage, explores human strength in the face of catastrophe in a way that feels fitting for today.

The Tran family’s saga of suffering laid out in poet Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s first novel, The Mountains Sing, is also that of her country, Vietnam. Truth is cast as the ultimate hero.

Life is not a puzzle that can be solved, observes the narrator in the Beijing-born author’s slyly comic new novel.

One way of overcoming an absence of travel is by reading about it. Let these books of adventure, whether real or imagined, whisk you far away.

In Chinese sci-fi writer Cixin Liu’s new book, ants and dinosaurs enter into a strange symbiotic relationship. It can be read as an allegory of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, or of the world’s two largest economies.

Older, wiser and not above a self-deprecating joke or two, the horror writer’s gilded late period continues with a collection of four works in If It Bleeds.

Book sales have increased by up to 400 per cent with dystopian fiction and heavyweight classics proving particularly popular.