BOOKS

Wake-up calls

Born in 1976, A Yi is a writer best known for his short stories and novellas. Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning is his first novel, which plots the life of a villain in a rural village, starting from the day he dies.

A Yi uses his novel to showcase his experience of rural China, and the strong personalities of people in the countryside.

An Italian-language translation of the book is already available, and an English version will be published soon.

A Yi, formerly a policeman in Jiangxi province where he was born, also worked as a magazine editor. The multilingual version of his book A Perfect Crime won him international acclaim, and the Wall Street Journal compared his writing style to "19th-century French modernists like Baudelaire and Rimbaud".

A crime thriller

Japanese crime-thriller writer Keigo Higashino is one of the best-selling authors in China, with Amazon.cn listing him as No 1 in 2017.

His new novel, The Murder in Mansion Masquerade, has sold 600,000 copies in Japan. But it is among his lesser known titles in China, and is published in simplified Chinese for the first time. The story is set in a villa where eight people are kidnapped by two armed men. On the second day one of eight is killed, but the killer is not one of the abductors.

A kitty miscellany

This book, Cats: An Illustrated Miscellany, is not about how to raise and play with meowing creatures, but about anecdotes, facts and quotes related to cats in fields ranging from literature and the arts to history and research. The author, Frederic Vitoux, and the four translators who rendered the book into Chinese from French, are all cat lovers.

Vitoux, 74, is a French writer and a member of the French Academy. He arranged the 116 entries in alphabetical order, and even dedicated one to stories about his pet cats. In the book, Vitoux talks about writer Ernest Hemingway's cat that used to babysit his son.

Do It Yourself

University students living on campus are fond of decorating their dorms as a demonstration of their personalities. For them and other DIY lovers, Thomas Baernthaler, the German author of Do It Yourself, has ways to achieve originality using simple steps. In his book, award-winning artists and designers are invited to contribute their ideas for art pieces, ranging from lamps to chairs.

British designer Sam Hecht, who has worked for Muji, teaches readers how to handmake a "flowerpot in the air".