Winner of the 2003 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize
Winner of a 2002 Betty Trask Award
A Washington Post’s Book of the Year
From a spellbinding storyteller comes a luscious novel set in contemporary rural China that explores the tumult of life post-Tiananmen Square.
‘‘A minor masterpiece…reading it is like discovering an early novel by D.H. Lawrence. It has strength and gentleness combined…it’s the most compulsively readable novel set in modern China I’ve ever read…Hill has all the hallmarks of a major writer. We will be hearing a lot more of him, and with luck before very long.’ Taipei Times
‘The Drink and Dream Teahouse is full of fascinating insight into the character of the Chinese people. This novel records a period of profound change in China, of course, but Justin Hill isn’t naïve enough to draw that like a fault-line through the story. He understands, like Tolstoy, that human nature cannot change along with the times.’
The Drink and Dream Teahouse Sample
From a spellbinding storyteller comes a luscious novel set in contemporary rural China that explores the tumult of life post-Tiananmen Square.
Here is an assured, full-bodied first book of poetry from an ward-winning, immensely gifted young writer. Her compelling explorations of inheritance and belonging, history and loss are nuanced and novelistic in scope, peopled with vivid voices and characters — the lost sailor on Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition; the drunken Irish poets marking the untimely death of a young writer; the sullen man who burns the hens in the yard along with his wife’s wedding dress; the four friends reeling ecstatically through a field at night, searching for a lost pint glass and toasting the dawn. Into the Early Hours presents us with a powerful, passionate poet of great strength and originality — a brilliant time-traveler who conjures the past so well she makes it present, and whose insight and skill herald the future.
