Adrift in the Middle Kingdom (Handheld Classics)

Jan Jacob Slauerhoff's 1934 novel Adrift in the Middle Kingdom is an epic sweep of narrative that takes the reader from 1920s Shanghai to a forgotten city beyond the Great Wall of China.

Narrated by a Belfast ship's radio operator who travels inland on a gun-runner's mission, desperate to escape the sea. He moves through extraordinary settings of opium salons, the house of a Cantonese watch-mender, the siege of Shanghai, the great flood on the western plains, and the discovery of oil by the uncomprehending overlord in the hidden city of Chungking. The fantasy ending transforms the novel from travelogue and adventure into existential meditation. But running like a thread of darkness through the story is opium, from poppy head harvesting to death through addiction.

This translation by David McKay, winner of the 2018 Vondel Prize, is the first English edition of Slauerhoff's most accessible and enthralling novel. The Introduction is by Slauerhoff expert Arie Pos and Wendy Gan of the University of Hong Kong.

Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898-1936) was a ship’s doctor serving in south-east Asia, and is one of the most important twentieth-century Dutch-language writers. He is best known for his Modernist poetry, but his two novels, published in English as The Forbidden Kingdom and Adrift in the Middle Kingdom, are very popular. He died of tuberculosis in 1936.

David McKay is an American Dutch-to-English translator based in The Netherlands. His clients include major museums, scholars, and publishing houses, and he is an approved translator by the Dutch Foundation for Literature, a semi-governmental organization. In 2017 he was awarded the biennial Vondel Prize for Translation, for his translation of War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans. In 2022 his translation of Adrift in the Middle Kingdom was the runner-up in the 2021 Vondel Prize for Translation.

Arie Pos has lectured on Dutch literature and culture at the universities of Coimbra, Lisbon and Oporto, and is a translator of Portuguese literature into Dutch and vice versa. As well as a Portuguese translation of The Forbidden Kingdom he has published many articles and several books on Jan Jacob Slauerhoff and his work.

Wendy Gan was Associate Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong until 2021. She is the author of Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian (2005) and Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing (2009). Her latest book, Comic China: Representing Common Ground, 1890–1945 (2018) examines Anglo-American representations of China and the politics of humour.