by Justin Hill
Gabriella Boston, The Washington Times
‘Justin Hill has said that during his evacuation flight from Eritrea in 1999, he read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s no surprise, then, that he brings that same sensibility to this novel of modern China that is really about the profound differences between the old and the new in a country that lies uneasily between both’
Lee Milazzo, Dallas Morning News
‘Hill weaves together ex-revolutionaries, wannabe opera singers, peasants-made-good and corrupt party officials. A fascinating journey’
Big Issue
‘The Drink and Dream Teahouse is noteworthy as one of the relatively few novels in English set in the China of ordinary people struggling to live according to rules that are constantly rewritten’
Chicago Tribune
‘A hugely ambitious novel.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘The wonderful thing about Justin Hill’s writing is that he presents the Chinese as neither exotic nor quirky, but as fully rounded people… His descriptions of China are video-like. One feels lifted up and transported to the village of Shaoyang…this is a bold picture of post-Tiananmen China, and his ability to absorb this complex culture is impressive….It’s the kind of book that will stay with you for years’
Asian Review of Books
‘A minor masterpiece…reading it is like discovering an early novel by D.H. Lawrence. It has strength and gentleness combined…it’s the most compulsively readable novel set in modern China I’ve ever read…Hill has all the hallmarks of a major writer. We will be hearing a lot more of him, and with luck before very long’
Bradley Winterton, Taipei Times
‘The setting of this story is absorbing on a number of levels…the story of broken hearts at the core of this fine first novel is effortlessly woven in and out of the drab flats and the even drabber lives of ordinary people, here brought wonderfully to life’
Irish Independent
‘When a factory closes down in a small Chinese town, it is a signal for the old culture to confront the new. A touching and funny portrayal of the lives, loves and losses of ordinary people coming to terms with the new China’
The Bookseller, Star Rating
‘Hill’s novel doesn’t fall into the travelogue trap or get bogged down with politics. It offers a compelling and very moving portrait of a community trying to find its way in an ever-changing world, and that’s something everyone can relate to. Excellent’
Matt Inslone, Time Out
‘The Drink and Dream Teahouse is full of fascinating insight into the character of the Chinese people. This novel records a period of profound change in China, of course, but Justin Hill isn’t naïve enough to draw that like a fault-line through the story. He understands, like Tolstoy, that human nature cannot change along with the times’
Edward Stern, The Independent on Sunday
‘In Hill’s China, the past is ever close behind…His voice is tender and wise beyond his years’
Publishers Weekly
‘Hill…spins a marvelously credible and affecting tale about a colony of human barnacles shipwrecked through decades of turbulent Chinese history…Hill displays an intimate, artfully nuanced knowledge of Chinese customs, bureaucracy, and character in one of those novels that seems, like its people, to have found its own rare way.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘In the shadow of the Chinese town of Shaoyang’s defunct Number Two Space Rocket Factory lives an eclectic group of people deeply rooted to the factory’s past as their town’s center of industry….Through the Cultural Revolution and the tragedy at Tiananmen Square, Hill’s cast of characters is like driftwood tossed about by China’s undulating political currents, with generational gaps that run deeper than any ocean’
Elsa Gaztambide, Booklist
‘The Drink and Dream Teahouse breathes life back into representations of modern China, and steers way from the historical memoire genre…There are elegiac splashes of beauty throughout, but the book also resists the urge to tie up every detail…This is an enjoyable debut that should lull you back too reading oriental titles if you’ve had enough of Geisha books’
Sinead Gleeson, RTÉ Online
‘On receiving a novel whose accompanying publicity is all about the vast sums publishers bid for it, a reviewers natural instinct is to sharpen the flaying knife. But I have to say that this one, which achieved a record-breaking advance, really is remarkably good’
Jessica Mann, Sunday Telegraph
‘Hill’s thoroughly developed characters come to life in an equally well-realized setting… [He] uses wit and great powers of observation…China has been thrown into upheaval as it adapts to capitalism, but most of the effects on its populace have been hidden from us. The disruption is the basis for Hill’s novel, which examines the shifting fortunes of some of the residents of the provincial city of Shaoyang. Hill’s decorously written tale of fraught romance amid social cataclysm is by turns entertaining, moving and amusing’
Library Journal
About the Author
Acclaimed novelist Justin Hill is the author of five books, winning the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Betty Trask and Somerset Maugham Awards, as well as being shortlisted and nominated for a host of other awards, including the Booker, and the rare double of having a novel banned in the People’s Republic of China, as well as winning the Xiaoxiang Friendship Award from the Governor of Hunan Province.
His latest novel, Shieldwall, is the first of a series about England’s epic tale: 1066, and the Norman Conquest, and was picked by the Sunday Times as a Best Novel of 2011. The sequel, Hastings is due to be published in Summer 2014.
He studied Old English and Medieval Literature at Durham University.
His books have been translated into fifteen languages.
www.justinhillauthor.com
Twitter: @JHillAuthor
Other works by Justin Hill
Arriving in Yuncheng, China as a starry-eyed 21-year-old teacher, Justin Hill expected the legend. Slowly, over the two years he spent teaching in the city, Hill began to gain insights into the real lives of contemporary China, realizing that nowhere was more authentically Chinese than this outpost nestling in a bend of the yellow river. Battling with the daily contraditions of a rich spiritual and cultural history and a Communist present, adapting to the gradual influence of the West with a robust good humor, the people of Yuncheng are a vital part of their country’s future. A Bend in the Yellow River is a unique view of a different way of life.
In the last years of the Tang Dynasty, a beautiful girl is born in a fort along the Great Wall of China, and is set to become the most famous and celebrated courtesan of her age. Set in the 9th century, Passing Under Heaven tells the tragic love story of Lily, and documents a time when Chinese women enjoyed a window of unprecedented personal freedom—including the freedom to fall in love. But when Lily pushes that freedom to its limits, disaster ensues, leaving her child and husband to forever mourn her loss. Based on historical fact, Passing Under Heaven is more than the story of the end of a love affair, but also a chronicle of the passing of the Chinese golden age into civil war and ruin.
The year is 1016 and England burns while the Viking armies blockade the great city of London. King Ethelred lies dying and the England he knew dies with him; the warring kingdoms of Mercia, Wessex and Northymbria tremble on the brink of great change. One man lives to bear witness to the upheaval: Godwin, barely out of boyhood and destined to become one of his country’s great warriors. When Ethelred’s son Edmund takes the throne, determined to succeed where his father failed, he plucks Godwin from domestic peace to be right-hand man in his loyal shield wall. Godwin must traverse the meadows, wintry forests and fogbound marshes of Saxon England, raising armies of monks, ploughmen and shepherds against the Viking invader. With epic courage and ferocity, Godwin and Edmund repel the butchering Danes in three great battles. But an old enemy, the treacherous
Earl Eadric, dogs Godwin’s footsteps, and as the final battle approaches, around the valiant English the trap begins to close.
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Table of Contents
The Drink and Dream Teahouse
Praise for The Drink and Dream Teahouse
About the Author
Other works by Justin Hill