"Whispering Shadows"

Jan-Philipp Sendker, born in Hamburg in 1960, was the American correspondent for Stern from 1990 to 1995, and its Asian correspondent from 1995 to 1999. In 2000 he published Cracks in the Wall, a nonfiction book about China. The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, his first novel, was an international bestseller. He lives in Berlin with his family.

Sendker applied the Page 69 Test to new novel, Whispering Shadows, and reported the following:

Of course page 69 is not representative of Whispering Shadows. I think only very few pages or paragraphs of a book can be.

This page only hints at one conflict in the book. There is also a murder mystery involved: a dead young American businessman is killed in China, and Paul Leibovitz is trying to help his parents to sort things out. (The alleged killer has an alibi.) He does not want to get involved and his girlfriend Christine asks him not to because she is scared of China, or the Chinese authorities to be precise.As a young girl she fled from China to Hong Kong with her mother because her father was killed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Since then she does not trust China anymore. Paul promises to stay out of the investigation but wants to help at the same time….

Visit Jan-Philipp Sendker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue