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Hello, today we span the globe, gleaning novel insights into the expat lifestyle in Hong Kong

and literary news from New Zealand. We offer advice on how to cope with the current avalanche of reading matter

and there's something nasty in the woodshed.

Now I thought a snood was a scarf-like thing that we all wore in the 1980s, but nowhere can I

find a definition of it as some kind of cooking pot. A literary mystery with Sarah Dillon, and on our

website you can read the passage from Cold Comfort Farm that she'll be

examining later in the program. But we start today in Hong Kong, one-time home of the best-selling

author of the piano teacher Janice Y. K. Lee and the city she returns to in her second novel.

The expatriates takes us deep into the heart of Hong Kong's transitory American community,

led by businessmen employed by global corporations who move with their jobs, relocating their families in the process.

Lee clearly knows her subject intimately.

This coruscating insight into a claustrophobic colonial lifestyle

as experienced by three women marooned in that city

and trapped in the small bubble of a temporary community is fascinating in its intimate detail.

Through the differing experiences of Lee's protagonists, the expatriates also provides a moving

examination of the mysteries of motherhood. Janice Lee joins me on the line from New York where she now lives.

Welcome, Janice.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

So tell me, where did the novels start? Was it with expat life or motherhood?

And why, that slightly surprising combination?

Well, I never know how my novels start. I'm not a plot-driven writer and I don't have an outline or anything that I follow. It started with actually this image of a woman lying in bed. It was the middle of the day and she was just lying there and she didn't want to get up. And she had a dinner party that night. I didn't know who she was or where she lived. And as I started to write about her and the people who surrounded her,

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