Goodreads is hosting a readers' Q&A with Hong Kong best-selling author Jonathan Chamberlain. message 1: by A.F. Please welcome Jonathan Chamberlain to our Q and A discussions. He is a writer who has been hijacked by life. When his daughter, Stevie, exploded into his life with all the problems she had to cope with, he ended up founding two charities [...]
Find out by reading this interview with the author of King Hui and the new Alphabet of Vietnam. What is your most recent book? Tell us a bit about it. My latest book is a novel called The Alphabet of Vietnam. Vietnam is a word that simultaneously conjures up a country and a war – and not just any war. [...]
There is a darkness in men’s hearts that war sets free. When their war is over, they bring that darkness back home with them. It’s a short trail from the jungles of Vietnam to the forests of the Appalachian Mountains. Read this excerpt from the new novel by Jonathan Chamberlain — in shops on June 16th. Chapter 1 I’m [...]
We've sold Jonathan Chamberlain's Chinese Gods into French, for publication next year by Éditions GOPE. Like us, they publish books about Asia, and their forthcoming titles include a translation of The World of Suzie Wong. So if you'd like to learn about Lei Kung and Lu Pan in the language of love, look out for Les Dieus Chinoises in your [...]
A letter from the heart, written by a father to his profoundly handicapped daughter You think you’ve got life sorted and then a child like Stevie comes along. But don’t think of Stevie as a tragedy. Don’t think of Stevie as a problem. Stevie was just a little girl. A gift to the world. A lot of bad things happened [...]
Listen to author Jonathan Chamberlain reading from his memoir Wordjazz for Stevie.
In 1986, Jonathan Chamberlain and his wife Bernadette had their first child, Stevie, a daughter. Stevie was immediately diagnosed with Down’s syndrome. A few months later it became clear that she had a serious heart defect that required a ‘hole in the heart’ operation. Something went wrong during the operation and Stevie suffered a momentary lack of oxygen that left [...]
There’s an interesting article in today’s Sunday Morning Post about Wang Jingwei, the wartime Chinese leader who collaborated with the Japanese to set up a puppet government in Nanjing, and who has been reviled by Chinese ever since as a traitor. Indeed, his very name carries the same derogatory associations as ‘Quisling’ in the West. It seems that Wang’s calligraphy [...]
Thanks to ULN at the insightful blog Chinayouren for his review of Chinese Gods: … in terms of surprises, this book delivers from the preface. First, you discover it was actually written and self-published by Chamberlain 30 years ago, inspired by a series of painted glass figures he collected from local markets. It goes on [...]
One of our bestselling titles from last year — King Hui: The Man Who Owned All The Opium In Hong Kong, by Jonathan Chamberlain — was chosen by Dymocks Booksellers last month as one of their 100 great reads of the decade. Below we print the first few pages of the book. Introduction This is the story of a man’s [...]
This month we're offering copies of Jonathan Chamberlain's Chinese Gods to the first three correct answers to our challenge question below. First, here's the book blurb: Chinese folk religion is the underlying belief system of more than a billion Chinese people. Go into any Chinese home, office or restaurant and you will see altars, statues or paper ‘good luck' images. [...]