Celestial Symbols

In October 1964, as Pearl Green approaches her twentieth birthday in a Hong Kong where the sixties are rocking, China is about to enter the global arms race by detonating the country's first nuclear device. The air is thick with intrigue and the anticipation of trouble, which breaks out when leading nuclear scientist Dr Lin Dei - ordered to return to Beijing after destroying his research results - murders his supervisor and flees, taking his valuable research papers with him. The reader meets again several of the characters from Red Bird Summer, witnesses further terrible events in Kowloon Walled City, and sees the Hei Ling Chau Island leper colony become both a haven from pursuit and a place to repent past crime. "Tiger Autumn is ... one of the best Hong Kong novels in years... Pearson has remembered that fiction is entertainment as much as art, and she is certainly a name to watch." -- William Wadsworth, Sunday Morning Post, 24 May 2015.