Dinah Lee Küng

Küng is a mother of three, wife of a retired International Red Cross delegate, and lives in Switzerland. She became a novelist after twenty years of reporting from Asia, mostly China and Hong Kong, for newspapers and magazines, including the Economist, International Herald Tribune and Business Week.
  Her first novel was a mystery, Left in the Care Of, which set a domestic kidnapping against the background of expat and local anxieties on the eve of Beijing's takeover of Hong Kong in 1997. (This thriller is was republished as the second volume of the trilogy, The Handover Mysteries in 2011.)
   Her first domestic satire, A Visit From Voltaire, was a comic autobiographical novel in which the phantom of Voltaire haunts her farmhouse as she tries to settle into life in Switzerland.
   A second domestic satire, her "Geneva novel," Under Their Skin, is a sophisticated love story using the metaphor of surfaces, reflections, skin and scars, to examine what lies underneath appearances. The interplay between the instinctive art of a birthmarked violinist versus the precision and sterility of her doctor's laser clinic, and the determined workaholism of his wife at the World Health Organization in leprosy relief is raises uncomfortable questions about conventional morality and the meaning of marriage.
Her latest literary comedy, Love and the Art of War published in 2012, returns readers to the light domestic tone of A Visit From Voltaire; in London's leafy NW1, a middle-aged librarian joins an evening class of bumbling businessmen to study the wiles of the ancient Chinese warlords, with the aim of reconquering, not the corner office, but the love of her life.
  Kung's signature in all three books is an interweaving of East and West themes, placing domestic comedy or melodrama in a well-researched historical or political context. Her stories are informed by a Catholic upbringing and a sensitivity to cross-cultural tensions with a mordant sense of humour that makes them highly readable.