Adam Williams

Adam Williams is a British novelist and businessman whose family has longstanding connections with China. Born and raised in Hong Kong and educated in Britain, he later returned to East Asia and held senior positions connected with Sino-British trade, including work for Jardine Matheson in Beijing. His familiarity with China’s landscapes, commercial networks and expatriate communities informs fiction concerned with the encounter between Chinese society and Western imperial power. Williams was appointed OBE in 1999 for services to Sino-British trade.

His Chinese historical novels include The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure, set during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, The Emperor’s Bones, which moves into the warlord era of the 1920s, and The Dragon’s Tail, continuing his exploration of political upheaval and foreign involvement in modern China. He also wrote The Book of the Alchemist, set against the Spanish Civil War. Williams later turned to the medieval eastern Mediterranean with A River of Blood, a murder mystery following the Jewish scholar Samuel in Egypt and Palestine during the First Crusade, and its sequel, A Sea of Tears. His novels are particularly relevant to readers interested in late Qing China, the Boxer Rebellion, the Chinese warlord era, the Spanish Civil War and the religious and political tensions of the medieval Middle East.