In TIGER AUTUMN, the reader meets again several of the characters from Red Bird Summer, witnesses further terrible events in Kowloon Walled City, and sees the Hei Ling Chau Island leper colony become both a haven from pursuit and a place to repent past crime. In October 1964, as Pearl Green approaches her twentieth birthday in a Hong Kong where the sixties are rocking, China is about to enter the global arms race by detonating the country’s first nuclear device. The air is thick with intrigue and the anticipation of trouble, which breaks out when leading nuclear scientist, Dr Lin Dei — ordered to destroy his research results and return to Beijing — murders his supervisor and flees, taking his valuable research papers with him. Like Pearson’s Red Bird Summer, Tiger Autumn focuses on Pearson’s beloved Hong Kong. Each book won a Publication Prize in successive competitions for the annual international Proverse Prize for unpublished writing.