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This book contains 51 sermons on High Days and Holy Days in the Christian calendar. Though arising from the author's own religious experience, many of the themes are universal and speak to people of all religious faiths and none and to all cultures. It is hoped they will appeal to the many people who are housebound and unable to attend their place of worship. It is hoped too that it will be welcomed by the tens of thousands of people who faithfully and doggedly sit, often on hard pews, listening to sermons every week. They are to be counted among the blessed. Students, ordinands and some Faith Leaders may also enjoy this collection.

Daniel Fang's mid-thirties are marked by the birth of his daughter and the death of a childhood friend. His daughter's birth and infancy reminds him of his own boyhood, his friend's death of the good times he had with back in their old neighbourhood.They were the kids from the wrong side of the temple, kids who grew up in the night market and next to the red light district. Their parents didn't like them visiting the market by themselves and expressly forbade them from taking a single step into Carnation Lane. But the appearance of a chained orangutan in a night market spectacle the year the three friends turned twelve convinced them to defy the parental ban. While the adults were away at a protest against Taiwan's endless Martial Law, they stole into the banned zone, released the beast from bondage and led it upstream, on a quest to find the fabled zoo.The memory of this all-but-forgotten childhood experience comes back after news of his friend's suicide. It seems to Daniel Fang that the two events must somehow be connected. A cryptologist by training, he decides to investigate, hoping to solve the mystery of his friend's death and decode the message contained within the memory that has shaped, even warped, their later lives.

Liv Grimstad is riding on a suburban train in Sydney, Australia in 1975 when she takes notice of the old man sitting opposite her. Though his features are different, she recognizes that man by the piercing look in his cornflower-blue eyes.She is convinced it is Donald Meissner, the man who has haunted her memory since they both worked at the German Embassy in Tokyo during the war. He was the beast who tormented and persecuted people, sending them into the hands of the Japanese Military Police. She does not confront him at first but rather sets out on a journey of detective work to uncover this man.LIV is a personal detective story and thrilling historical mystery set in Australia in 1975 and Tokyo in 1945. But it tells a universal tale about how the past bears on our present and future. LIV is a gripping mystery, of a present haunted by the past, but also a profoundly moral book, asking of the reader: what would you do? In this, LIV deserves comparison with novels as great as An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.David Peace, author of Tokyo Year Zero

An award-winning unput-downable tale of two children building a boat from a log they find buried in the sand and sailing off to far-off fantastic lands in a stormy sea-driven adventure with their faithful - but accident-prone - dog Holly. There they learn much wisdom from a king who, like God, has many names. After an incredible sacrifice of his dearest dream by the boy (now growing up) they return - another dream - to a family tea with their loved ones. The tale is a prequel and companion to Ruth Finnegans award-winning epic romance Black inked pearl, here adapted for preteens but characterised by (in a simpler form) the same unique dream-like and enchanted style as in the original novel.

When the fervour of revolution is gone, what remains? Four leftist teenagers in 1950s Malaya dedicate themselves to overthrowing colonialism and bringing about a better world. With time, their paths diverge into capitalism, into adultery, into the dark heart of the Cultural Revolution. Disillusioned and middle-aged, they look back at their lives from the prosperous but soulless 1980s, wondering what has become of their dreams and ideals. Winner of the Singapore Literature Prize

After the tragic death of Liur's mother, her father, a thwarted artist working as a doctor in the family hospital, is overcome with grief. He goes to study in America, leaving six-year-old Liur in the care of her grandparents, promising to return with a special doll for her.But instead of studying, her father travels to the Andes, where he meets a mysterious ventriloquist who takes him as a pupil.Five years later, he returns home, bringing with him one of the ventriloquist's dolls. But it is not a present for Liur; instead, it becomes a menacing presence in the house, causing strife within the family. After observing her father performing strange rituals with the doll, Liur must find a way to defeat her demons real or imagined.

Through misunderstanding, sympathy, reconciliation and love, seven schoolchildren forged an abiding friendship in their hometown Penghu, a cluster of islands in the Taiwan Strait. Brought together by their Arts and Crafts teacher, the children learned to cherish their friendship and to understand their cultural roots. At their farewell party, they promised to come back for a reunion twenty years later, on the evening of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Now working in Canada, Glasses is coming home to keep his promise. Penghu's landscapes - waves, fields, cows, coral-stone walls, horsetail trees and gaillardias - summon back memories at school, in the pottery workshop, and on a trip to the Isle of Jibei. As he makes his way towards the old workshop, Glasses relives those memories and contemplates the meaning of home.The Taiwanese writer Li Tong's award-winning novel, Again I See the Gaillardias, is a deeply moving story about friendship, growing up, homecoming, self-identification and local attachments.

Riku Sato is in the fifth grade, when he moves from Utsunomiya to Fukushima to switch schools. Minamisoma, the town he arrives in, is virtually desertedafter the devastating earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 11, 2011, which struck the Tohoku region in Japan and triggered a nuclear meltdown, not a single soul is in sight; not in the roads, nor in the school grounds. Riku spends endless, humdrum days in this ghost town, yearning to play outside, to take his bicycle out for a spin and ride like the wind, when he comes across the otherworldly, sparkling snowscape of a mountain in northern Japan. There, in the majestic kingdom of white, he befriends good-natured grownups; encounters wild animals in the mountains; and comes into contact with a mysterious boy and his equally mysterious companion, Tonchi Riku and the Kingdom of White is a coming-of-age story of a wide-eyed boys courage, brimming with hope of a bright and shining future. It is also the story of the lost innocence of an untold number of children who continue to live, day after day, undaunted, in Fukushima, after March 11, 2011, in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake.

A reclusive young boy stumbles upon his father's diary. Filled with drawings, photos and anecdotes, the diary reveals an alpine world that his father once inhabited as a child: where tribes were fashioned by tree spirits; animals could be spoken to; fleas danced; and the moon and stars were guiding lights in darkling forests. His father's world was alive with birdsong and hidden spirits, serene yet fleeting-but it all changed when he befriended two bears.Bewitching and timeless, award-winning Taiwanese author Chang Ying-Tai's The Bear Whispers to Me is a poignant forest fable about the vivid beauty of the natural world, childhood, loss and the transient nature of time. (Winner of the 2015 Lennox Robinson Literary Award)