For Emperor and Country, or Love and Family? Zimei (子美) is faced with a bleak future. Despite his great potential and hailing from an illustrious lineage, he serves his Emperor as a lowly Tang Dynasty official, having failed the Imperial Examinations twice. He sets out on a lifelong journey, seeking out first hermits and sages, then peace and home while documenting in verse the sufferings unleashed by civil war, sealing a friendship with the infamous Li Bai that will leave a remarkable legacy to Chinese literature. Zimei's story is the life of Du Fu (杜甫, 712-770), China’s first poet-historian and the nation’s greatest poet, reimagined in this epic debut novel by multi-award-winning author Boey Kim Cheng. “Subdued and sensitive. The triumphs and sorrows of one of China’s greatest poets are narrated with grace and autumnal beauty.” —Tan Twan Eng, Man Asian Literary Prize-winning author of The Garden of Evening Mists
Author
Boey Kim Cheng is a multi-award winning Singapore-born poet, and a 1996 recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award. He emigrated to Australia in 1997, but returned in 2013 as one of Nanyang Technological University's writers-in-residence; he is currently Associate Professor in the NTU Division of English. He has published five collections of poetry, including Clear Brightness, which was selected by The Straits Times as one of the Best Books of 2012. His writing is frequently studied in tertiary and university institutions in Singapore and abroad. Boey co-founded Mascara Literary Review in 2007, the first Australian literary journal to promote Asian Australian writing, and in 2013 co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. In 2017, Epigram Books reissued his celebrated travel memoir Between Stations, and released his first novel, Gull Between Heaven and Earth, on the life of the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu.
