Tuesday, Apr 29, 2014

Linda Jaivin at Asia Bookroom

Tuesday April 29th.

 
Join us to hear Linda Jaivin speak about her latest novel.

Set in China in the first part of the 20th Century The Empress Lover is an intriguing tale....

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Linda Jaivin will be introduced by Professor Richard Rigby. Professor Rigby is the Executive Director of the ANU's China Institute.

‘Stories are the only thing that defy death. Stories are truth. I hereby give you mine…’ Peking, 1944: Sir Edmund Backhouse is a man of many parts. A polyglot scholar. An effete homosexual. A genius of perversity, a forger, arms salesman, occasional spy and fantasist. Also, if he is to be believed, the onetime lover of the redoubtable Empress Dowager of China, a woman many decades his senior. In his declining years, tended by his friend, Dr Hoeppli, he writes his memoir - ‘a wild tale’, as he calls it, ‘far-fetched and fantastical’- of his affair with the Dowager Empress.

Beijing, 2014: Linnie is an Australian woman of uncertain provenance struggling to make a living in Beijing. A Sinophile, a translator of film subtitles, the author of an unpublished novel about Backhouse called The Empress Lover. One day, she receives an intriguingly old-fashioned and formal invitation from a Professor H, an invitation that promises to reveal long hidden secrets of her family… And so two worlds collide. An enchantingly slippery, sinuous, playful - and ultimately very moving - novel of love, loss, identity and history from one of Australia's finest novelists.

‘Jaivin’s writing shines and burns.’ Sunday Age

About Author:

Linda Jaivin is the internationally published author of nine books, seven fiction and two non-fiction. Her first novel, Eat Me, was a best-seller in both Australia and overseas. Her fifth novel, The Infernal Optimist, was short-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and has been optioned for a feature film. The Empress Lover is her seventh novel. Linda is also the author of numerous published short stories and essays, including Quarterly Essay 52: Found in Translation: In Praise of a Plural World. She has also written for the theatre and is a literary and film translator from Chinese.

When: 6pm Tuesday April 29th, 2014

Where: Asia Bookroom, Unit 2, 1 - 3 Lawry Place, Macquarie. ACT

RSVP: By 28th of April, either by phoning 6251 5191 or Email Us

Admission by gold coin donation to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation

This is an event not to be missed, but, if you can't join us on the 29th of April and would like to buy a copy, let us know as it can easily be arranged.