Our Latest Releases

CHINA RUNNING DOG

A young man in his early twenties has two basic needs: mates and respect. And a third of course. That’s a given and it was there for the taking in Shanghai in the year 2000, a greed-crazed free-for-all in a moral and lawless vacuum created by the Chinese Communist Party.

Johnny Trent, small-time entrepreneur from Basildon in the UK, has neither mates nor respect. That’s why he went to China, where he meets Felix Fawcett-Smith, fresh off the boat and from the other side of the tracks. An unlikely friendship begins.

Johnny impresses the well-bred Felix with his street smarts until Felix takes Johnny’s advice too literally – and too far – and slip into Shanghai’s murky underbelly. He enters a world where the Party and power and connections to them are all that matter, where
criminals are given sainthoods and saints sent to hell.

Johnny tries to stop Felix’s spiral, not least because Felix is taking a sweet, angelic girl, Anita, down with him and Johnny has feelings for Anita that he has never dared to put into words. But Felix thinks he knows best. Like Johnny, all he wants is respect.

He gets a lot more, a lot worse. It’s up to Johnny to save whoever he can, besides himself.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mark Kitto lived in China for eighteen years, having studied the language at SOAS, University of London. In China he founded and built a successful English-language magazine business known as that’s magazines. The Chinese government seized the business in 2004 and is still running it profitably. Mark told the story and its aftermath in two popular memoirs: That’s China: a British entrepreneur versus the China propaganda machine and China Cuckoo: how I lost a fortune and found a life in China. From his mountain retreat near Shanghai, the subject of China Cuckoo, he wrote a popular monthly column for Prospect (UK) magazine. He also wrote the magazine’s most widely read – to date – feature article about China: ‘You’ll Never be Chinese’. He returned to the UK in 2013 and is a professional actor, writer and editor. His self-penned one-man show, ‘Chinese Boxing’, set during the Boxer Uprising in 1900, is staged on a regular basis. Mark has had short fiction published in the Asia Literary Review. China Running Dog is his first novel. He now lives in Norfolk and London. Mark spends his spare time sailing and trying to remember how to cook Chinese food.