WINNER OF THE ARTHUR ROSS BOOK AWARD FROM THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS • ACCLAIMED AS ONE OF THE YEAR’S 10 BEST BOOKS BY THE WASHINGTON POST • 12 ESSENTIAL NONFICTION BOOKS BY THE NEW YORKER • 100 NOTABLE BOOKS BY THE NEW YORK TIMES • BEST BOOKS BY...

This account of the horrors faced by the author during China's Cultural Revolution tells of her arrest, the failed attempts to make her confess to spying, her imprisonment, and the story of her survival

Blood Road is a complex mix of social history, literary analysis, political biography, and murder mystery. It explores and analyzes the social and cultural dynamics of the Chinese revolution of the 1920s by focusing on the mysterious 1928 assassination...

The reign of Emperor Yongle, or "Perpetual Happiness," was one of the most dramatic and significant in Chinese history. It began with civil war and a bloody coup, saw the construction of the Forbidden City, the completion of the Grand Canal,...

Zen, haiku, martial arts, sushi, anime, manga, film, video games . . . Japanese culture has long enriched our Western way of life. Yet from a Western perspective, Japan remains a remote island country that has long had a complicated relationship with the...

Winner of the Cundill History PrizeShortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-FictionShortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in NonfictionShortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural UnderstandingOne of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of...

A sweeping journey through twenty-first century India's violent lurch towards autocracy. Since Narendra Modi’s election in May 2014, India has become more dysfunctional and dangerous than ever. The "world's largest democracy" has seen a cascade of events...

The new path for economic development that India must createThe whole world has a stake in India’s future, and that future hinges on whether India can develop its economy and deliver for its population—now the world’s largest—while staying democratic...

The Art of Persistence examines the relations between art and politics in transwar Japan, exploring these via a microhistory of the artist, memoirist, and activist Akamatsu Toshiko (also known as Maruki Toshi, 1912–2000). Scaling up from the details of...

In this innovative study, Erica Fox Brindley examines how, during the period 400 BCE–50 CE, Chinese states and an embryonic Chinese empire interacted with peoples referred to as the Yue/Viet along its southern frontier. Brindley provides an overview of...

Conventional wisdom has it that the concept of individualism was absent in early China. In this uncommon study of the self and human agency in ancient China, Erica Fox Brindley provides an important corrective to this view and persuasively argues that an...

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY 'A narrative of startling originality ... As discussions of Britain's colonial legacy become increasingly polarised, we are in ever more need of nuanced books like this one' SAM DALRYMPLE,...