Zhou Rucheng is an eighth-grade student with a passion for drawing and few, trusted friends. The last year of middle school is psychologically intense, in China, because final exams determine the quality of high school one will be able to enter. A first step into adult life that can have fundamental consequences, for a person. Add to that the first beatings, the bullying of an older bully who humiliates boys and the feeling, which never leaves Zhou Rucheng, that he is destined for nothing good because he is not good enough even at the thing he loves most. Golo Zhao, one of the foremost exponents of the contemporary Chinese graphic novel, creates a coming-of-age novel with clear autobiographical echoes, one that makes you root for its little protagonist and gives such precise emotional descriptions that it seems to fish in the adolescent experience of those reading the story. A long book, but one that you will wish would never end. (Source: Bao Publishing, translated)

She has been drawn into the life of the phoenix, such fate – “The Emperor Swallow”, but few days later she married the Prime Minister; she possesses beauty that overthrows cities and ruins states but also has a talented and virtuous mind, yet her husband is deeply in love with the Emperor’s doted consort. On their wedding night, his face filled with guilt, says to her: Apart from love, I can give you anything…… Though deep in nobility, her life is not monotonous, to pick up the new number one scholar from within the imperial palace, to rescue the Nu clan’s prince in the back alleys, and with the young general falling off the cliff, with the Emperor engaging in a battle of wits over the inner palace……. Many men were unable to conquer her beauty and wisdom, yet when trying to win the beauty, they cannot let go of their plundering desires in lust for power. Within the imperial court, there is an underlying turbulence of disputing fronts. On the battlefield, there is the slaughtering of armoured cavalry……the tender grace of a beauty, hearts fuelled with lust for power, which is it that is the burial of such heroes? Troubled times since the war, they survive in this strife, fighting to dominate this world, seizing the beauty that overthrows cities and ruin states…… The world, because of this beauty, is in chaos; but who is it that this beauty charmingly smiles at?