THAI GIRL in French!

Amazing! An excellent French publisher specialised in SE Asian subjects, Editions Gope, has just launched my novel, THAI GIRL translated into in French. Needless to say I am thrilled.

The first edition of the book was published in Bangkok in 2004 with a red cover and became an immediate best seller. One reviewer described it as, "one of the biggest-selling English language novels ever published in Thailand". Wow! The book is still distributed by Asia Books and many hundreds of copies are in book shops and airports throughout Thailand.



Then in 2006 the novelist Stephen Leather kindly recommended THAI GIRL to Monsoon Books in Singapore. They met me in Bangkok and quickly brought out a new edition for distribution worldwide. In Singapore it hit second place in the leading bookseller's best seller list beating a host of top selling international authors. Monsoon also issued the novel as an ebook so is available at a touch of the keys.

I have forgotten how many times the paper book has been reprinted but together with an unknown number of ebooks the novel has sold many tens of thousands of copies.

This is the cover of the Monsoon edition, an interesting contrast to the powerful realism of the new French version.



I now hope the French edition will be as much enjoyed as has been the English original. And a translator is now working on a translation into German.

Jack Reynolds' China Blog is Out

Jack Reynolds, author of seminal Bangkok novel, A WOMAN OF BANGKOK, has just published his latest book, though he died way back in 1984.

Called, A TRUE FRIEND TO CHINA, the book is a collection of the newsletter articles he wrote while doing medical relief work in China in the dark days of the nineteen forties. Written for a tiny audience of his Friends Ambulance Unit colleagues and since lost and forgotten, I think it's some of his very best writing. With the day to day immediacy of a blog, it really gives you the feeling of what it was like to be there in a feudal, poverty stricken China, desperately facing civil war and facing revolutionary change. And his writing always sparkles and is funny and perceptive.

It's available in the USA at Quaker Books at Pendle Hill and online at www.quakerbooks.org. For other sales please contact me at arhicks56@hotmail.com.

See also www.fauchinaconvoy.blogspot.com for lots more pictures and find me on Facebook.

It's a truly great book which I can confidently say as I didn't write most of it and I took only about three of the 500 photos. 'Cos I wasn't there in 1940!

JACK'S BOOKS!

Some seven years ago I became fascinated with Jack Reynolds because he had written only one book, the remarkable novel, A WOMAN OF BANGKOK. It was published in New York and London, was much reissued and translated and is still in print today, a tribute to it's enduring qualities.

I decided to photograph my collection of books by Jack and they include one of his own poetry, short stories of China and even a survey of industries in Thailand. I now realise it's not exactly true that he only wrote one book, though he was probably at his best with the bite sized piece.

And soon there will be another one, my own edited collection of his writings in China about the Friends Ambulance Unit, many bites making for a tasty menu of stories.

JACK JONES-A TRUE FRIEND TO CHINA should be out soon. I'm now pretty impatient after five years' research.

A True Friend to China - So Nearly There!

After five years of research on the Friends Ambulance Unit 'China Convoy' we're so nearly there. Earnshaw Books in Shanghai have finalised the cover, we have agonised through fifteen drafts of digital proofs, tweaking and editing incessantly, and now it's time for the printers to produce a mock-up of the book for final approval. In March I am flying to Yunnan, China and with other FAU friends will take a tour of the Burma Road and some of the places that Jack Jones and his men worked in the forties. Then on to Hong Kong and on March 27th I will be giving a talk to the Royal Asiatic Society about the 'China Convoy'. If all goes well a parcel of books will meet me there and I'll be able to show them off and sell them at the talk. It's going to be a large format book, lavishly illustrated and with a unit cost for printing of about £15 it had better be good. Wow! I can't wait.

Summer of Sixty Nine

Guess I like my cars and there was no better year than the open road in the summer of sixty nine with hazy Jane, rollin' down the highway and getting my kicks on the Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge Parkway in a great grey Pontiac GTO. Foot hard down, steering one-handed, my extra-tanned left arm out the window,and enjoying the scream of somebody else's rubber on hot tarmac as we stormed up through the hairpins. Auto driveaway from New York to Fort Lauderdale. All we paid was the gas!

Then on the way home, brought a big Ford station wagon back to New York. Sleeping in the mountains in the car we couldn't get out in the night because of the bears sniffing about.

Had to go up to Toronto to see what mounties looked like as they must be everywhere. Can't remember what I'd done wrong.

The Breasts of Dora - Shock Photos!

When Jack Reynolds gave a copy of A WOMAN OF BANGKOK to Bernard Llewellyn, his best buddy from the Friends Ambulance Unit 'China Convoy', he wrote the above on the title page and it puzzled me greatly. Meeting and pausing awhile in the back streets of Bangkok is one thing but...! So I put the question to Jack's old China friend, Howell Jones in Newfoundland and he quickly came up with the answer. Jack and Bernard were keen climbers when in China; near the FAU depot in Kweiyang there were some strange conical hills which they must have named in Dora's honour. And now at last I even think I have found the hills themselves, to the right of the picture seen across the roofs of the village by the depot.

But who was Dora? Well, I think I now know this too. In the FAU Register is listed Dora Chau, otherwise Tsou Ling-hwa and this week at the Imperial War Museum in London she took off her dark glasses in my presence and gave a most wonderful smile. At least, we were watching a faded colour film of the China Convoy in the early forties but it was enough to suggest she would have deserved a special association with those mountains. I believe that Dora was a refugee from the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, an educated woman, a student perhaps, who fled into the interior of China, to Kweiyang and into a job with the China Convoy. She may have returned to Hong Kong after the hostilities and I would really love to know. There's more about Jack and Dora in my forthcoming book, but I don't want this blog post to be a spoiler!

Magical China Photos

Part of my research into the adventures of Jack Reynolds in China with the Friends Ambulance Unit distributing medical supplies in the nineteen forties has been collecting photos. I had nothing to start with but by tracing families of former FAU members I have managed to build up a fine collection to illustrate my book. What follows is an arbitrary selection, chosen mainly because they are of low definition that should post easily.