About the Author

Justin Hill was born in Freeport, Grand Bahama Island but grew up in York. As an adult, he worked for seven years with the Voluntary Service Overseas in rural China and Africa. Hill's works have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize three times and have also received many awards and honors, including the Betty Trask Award and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his first novel, The Drink and Dream Teahouse. He lives in Hong Kong. Wang Dulu (pen name of Wang Baoxiang) is widely considered the master of the wuxia genre and is most well-known for his five-part Crane-Iron Series, which has never before been translated into English. Born into a poor family in Beijing in 1909, Wang Dulu worked at a small newspaper and as a clerk for a merchant association before becoming a writer of romance, detective, and wuxia novels. He lived through many periods of political upheaval, including the New Culture Movement, May Fourth Movement, and Chinese Revolution. During Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, Wang Dulu was deployed to the countryside and sentenced to farm labor. He died in 1977 and was survived by his wife and three children.