Authors talk about their work this week at the Bookworm in Beijing:

Tuesday April 5, 7:30 pm: H. Ronken Lynton was the third woman to be appointed to the Harvard Business School faculty just after World War II. She spent most of the years since then living in Asia. She will talk about her first Novel, The Sawdust House

Thursday April 7, 7:30 pm:Xinran, author of The Good Women of China talks about her new book Sky Burial.

Details below, or visit the Bookworm's website.

Tuesday April 5th , 7:30pm: The Sawdust House - A Book Talk by H. Ronken Lynton

H. Ronken Lynton was born and grew up in Minnesota, with links to the Scandinavian community there. She broke with the family tradition and went off to Radcliffe to study. After working in Washington during World War II, she became the third woman to be appointed to the Harvard Business School faculty. In 1953 Rolf Lynton came to her department on a fellowship, and in 1955 they were married and set out for Asia. Of the past 50 years, besides traveling in Asia they have spent more than 20 years in India, 5 in Indonesia, and one in Botswana. She has published a lot of management books, as well as three biographies of leading Indian figures. This is her first novel and first non-management writing to be based in America.

Ronnie will talk about her life's journey, and read excerpts from her novel The Sawdust House.

Books will be available for sale on the night

Thursday April 7th, 7:30pm: Book Talk by Author of The Good Women of China - Xinran

Xinran was born in Beijing in 1958. Her family was well-off and westernised: her grandfather worked for GEC. Her parents were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, and she was brought up by Red Guards as a child of the Revolution, not regarding her parents as her family.

In the late 1980s, as part of the move to open up broadcasting, she was asked to run a late night radio programme Words on the Night Breeze.

The phone calls and the letters she received at Words on the Night Breeze showed her much that she had not known about the lives of women in China: the emotional poverty of a society just emerging from the Cultural Revolution, when even the mildest sexual display was seen as delinquent, the material poverty of the majority of people, especially in the villages, the low value attached to women's lives.

In 1997 Xinran moved to London, and it was there that she began to put together all the stories she had been told by women who had struggled through the most appalling experiences, but who would be judged by these bizarre and arbitrary standards. The result was her first book, The Good Women of China.

Now she has written another book, and again it is the true story of a woman's life. Sky Burial is the story of how Xinran was introduced by a listener to her radio programme to Shu Wen, a Chinese woman who had spent 30 years in Tibet, searching for her lost husband: it sounds like a romance, and Xinran says her publishers urge her to try writing fiction but that she has no idea how to write fiction. The book is shaped by her dedication to telling the truth of the story as it was told to her, and as she has been able to piece it together since. There is yet another layer of strangeness here: strange as China seems to us, to Xinran it is Tibet which is the extraordinary place.

She is particularly enthusiastic about Mother Bridge, a charitable organisation which she has founded to help to build bridges between China and the west, helping each to reach a better understanding of the other. While everyone can benefit from this, the people who need it most are Chinese children growing up with adoptive families in the west, knowing little or nothing of their background, and their adoptive parents. Hitherto she has written about the China of today and its roots in its recent past; now she is ready to start building from that past on into China's future.