Tash Aw was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1971 from Malaysian parents. When he was two years old his parents moved back to their homeland, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he grew up. He was educated at a Catholic School and moved to England with his parents when he was in his teens.

He read law at the University of Cambridge and Warwick and with his degree in hand, he worked in various jobs, including as a lawyer for four years. In 2002 he obtained a degree at the School of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, while working on his first novel which he completed during this time.

The Harmony Silk Factory, Tash Aw’s first novel, was published in 2005. It was long listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, won the 2005 Whitbread Book Award First Novel Award and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Asia Pacific region), as well as the Guardian First Book Prize. It was also long listed for the 2007 International Impac Dublin Award.

The Harmony Silk Factory was translated to several languages. Tash Aw, comments on Literature, film and culture in South East Asia for the BBC on a regular basis. Tash Aw’s second novel, Map of the Invisible World, was published in May 2009. He currently lives in Islington, London.

The Harmony Silk Factory is set in the 1930s and 1940s with the background of the second world war and the Japanese who are about to invade British occupied Malaysia. The title of the book refers to Johnny Lim’s textile shop in the Kinta valley, where he ran his illegal shady businesses and his political affairs.

The novel is divided into three parts. Each part represents the opinion of the narrator and his version of Johnny’s mysterious life, by going backwards and forwards in time.

His son Jasper, who is now in his forties and seems to dislike his father strongly, starts the narration in a subjective way. He is followed by Johnny’s famously beautiful, unfaithful, well-bred, deceased wife, Snow Soong, who died at childbirth, through her diary. The third and last version of the novel is by Johnny Lim’s best friend, the eccentric British expatriate, Peter Wormwood, who is in his seventies and spent most of his life in Malaysia.

Peter reminisces about the past, while debating with his inmates about the flora and fauna in order to plan a design for an English style garden in the old people’s home, run by the Catholic Church, where he now lives.

Three different characters, three distinct accounts and viewpoints about the same events, re-shaped by each narrator in order to shed a variety of light on the main character, the Chinese born, Johnny Lim, the self made, highly ambitious rich merchant.

Jasper, his son portrays him as an objectionable, hateful, dishonest, murderer, traitor and Machiavellian personality. His wife, Snow Soong, sees him as a naive, taciturn person of a humble background. While his friend Peter describes him as the best and only friend he ever had.

Throughout the story the reader never finds out Johnny Lim’s version in order to surmise if he was a hero or a villain or read his side of the story. In fact, the author ends his novel with a few loose ends, maybe as an invitation for the reader to draw his own conclusion.

The reader better gets to know the psychologically tortured, repressed feelings of the human imperfection of these well developed main characters: Johnny Lim, Snow Soong, Peter Wormwood, his unpleasant compatriot, Frederick Honey, the manager of the British controlled tin mine and the suavely cunning, multi-lingual, highly cultured, Japanese professor Mamoru Kunichika, to whom Snow was strongly attracted during their action-adventure trip to the mysterious Seven Maiden islands, which is supposed to be Johnny and Snows belated honeymoon trip.

The Harmony Silk Factory is a novel without much action, with loose ends and yet it’s a pleasurable book to read. Because of the author’s skillful writing, his prose is pure and uncluttered and his psychological analysis of each character with his strength and weaknesses, gives a credible dimension to the story. Last but not least is his vivid description of the luxuriant nature of the beautiful Malaysia.

Born in Norway in 1970, Asne Seierstad studied Russian, Spanish and History of philosophy at Oslo University. She has worked as war correspondent in war-torn regions, like Chechnya in Russia between 1993 and 1996. Then from 1998 to 2000 she reported on the war in Kosovo for the Norwegian television.

In the Autumn 2001 she spent three months in Afghanistan, and in 2003 she reported on the war in Iraq. She received many awards for her good journalism. Asne Seierstad is fluent in five languages.

The Bookseller of Kabul was first published in 2002. It sold 220.000 copies in Norway alone, which made it the Norwegian non-fiction best-seller book of all time in the history of the country.

In the UK it was the best selling non English language book of 2004. The Bookseller of Kabul has been translated into fourteen languages.

After spending three months among soldiers, reporting, travelling by horse and by foot in Afghanistan, Asne came across Sultan Khan (Shah Mohammed Rais) in his book shop in Kabul at the Intercontinental hotel. She was very pleased to meet this well educated, English-speaking native who managed to keep his trade going through all the hard time the country has endured.

He was arrested, sent to jail, and his shop was destroyed. First the communists burned his books, then the mujahideen looted and pillaged, and finally the Taliban burnt them all over again.

Sultan Khan allowed Asne Seierstad, a western journalist to live with his family and write a book about them and about the newly liberated Kabul. Such generous hospitality allowed Asne Seierstad to stay with the family for three months. She could speak English with Sultan Khan, his eldest son Mansur and his nineteen year old sister Leila, who have been educated in Pakistan. They provided her with all the information she needed to learn about the family. As a western journalist lady, Seierstad could mix with men as well as women.

The Bookseller of Kabul is written more like a journalistic reportage than literature. The main character is Sultan Khan who is described as a selfish, ruthless,cruel despot who denies his children educational opportunities, and yet knows the value of books and education. He is a well educated engineer, he is liberal in his thinking, he reads a great deal, he believes in the freedom of speech, and but he is conservative in every way.

After his father’s death he becomes the head of the family and no one can oppose his will. He is not liked by his family for being a despot.

Seierstad says about him: “He was very democratic in inviting me into his home, very generous and helpful. He said I was welcome to move in and to write whatever I wanted. He is very concerned about Afghanistan being known in the world. He’s got great respect for journalists, those who come and write about his country. But he is a man with many sides. He is educated, trained as an engineer,and he has read all the history of the region and all the poetry. He has not read the modern books or foreign books and doesn’t have the broad kind of knowledge that an intellectual would. He is really a village boy…. when it comes to running his family, he has only one model and that’s his father.”

After The Bookseller of Kabul was published, Shah Mohamed Rais went to Oslo to have his “honor restored” by denouncing the book and seeking legal redress and compensation, as told in the Oslo’s Aftenposten newspaper.

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The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad was discussed by the members of the Book Club of the United Nations Womens’ Guild on Friday, 12th January 2007.