Gull Between Heaven and Earth

For Emperor and Country, or Love and Family? Zimei ( ) 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 ( , 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.

Auteur
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 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. Boey has published five collections of poetry, including Clear Brightness (selected by The Straits Times as one of the Best Books of 2012), as well as Between Stations, a celebrated travel memoir reissued by Epigram Books in 2017. His writing is frequently studied in tertiary and university institutions in Singapore and abroad. Gull Between Heaven and Earth is his first novel.