The Rice Paper Diaries

In the spring of 1940, Elsa Jones finds herself lonely and homesick in a changing Hong Kong as war threatens. Bomb shelters spring up and soldiers appear on the streets. When Hong Kong falls to the Japanese, Elsa and her husband Tommy are captured and interned in a makeshift camp on the southern side of the island, where, along with the rest of the colonial elite, they struggle to survive in hostile surroundings. Several years later, they return to Wales with their six-year-old daughter Mari, who has only ever known life in the camp. A story of war told from the edges, this book interweaves four separate accounts—Elsa, her Chinese servant Lin, Tommy, and Mari—to relate the intimate havoc wrought by military conflict on individual lives.

Francesca Rhydderch is a freelance literary editor, a former associate editor of Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, and a former editor of the New Welsh Review.