SIGNAL 8 PRESS

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Signal 8 Press is an independent press founded in 2009 in Hong Kong. Since 2021, we have been based in the UK, and our original remit of focusing on writing from the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East has now expanded. We’re global. We’re scrappy. We’re a little bit weird. Check us out.

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There is Fire Here

There is Fire Here

Metadata: Publication date: Sept 5, 2023 Print edition: 5" x 8" perfect bound trade paperback Page count: 148 ISBN: 978-1-915531-04-9 Price (paper): US$18.95 E-book formats: ePub, Kindle, PDF Word count: 42,000 eISBN: 978-1-915531-05-6 Price (e-book): US$8.99...

The Picture Vanishes

The Picture Vanishes

When Simone meets Agnes in the first grade, she becomes convinced that her brother Glenn, who died the previous year in Vietnam, has been reincarnated in her new friend. After a photo of Glenn and Simone disappears, Simone is convinced Agnes has stolen it, but doesn’t...

Apparitions

Apparitions

Metadata: Publication date: February 7, 2023 Print edition: 5" x 8" perfect bound trade paperback Page count: 168 ISBN: 978-1-915531-02-5 Price (paper): US$18.95 E-book formats: ePub, Kindle, PDF Word count: 46,000 eISBN: 978-1-915531-03-2 Price (e-book): US$8.99...

When Your City Vanishes

When Your City Vanishes

Since July 2020, the city of Hong Kong has gone through what can best be called a political and cultural reboot, erasing (or at least reconfiguring) its former hard drive. Two years on, It seems an appropriate moment to reflect on what the city of Hong Kong was and...

Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations

Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations

Synopsis: Observations of contemporary life that make monkeys of us: this existential disbelief thrums through speculative stories and essays in Xu Xi’s latest collection. These 16 short pieces, evenly divided between fiction and nonfiction, are in turn elegiac,...

Laila

Laila

Synopsis: Although the Arabic world is as diverse as any other region, customs and traditions endure. Injustices continue. And then there is Laila. Trapped in a marriage to a man she finds physically revolting, Laila begins to realize secret truths about her...

This City is a Minefield

This City is a Minefield

Synopsis: This City is a Minefield is a collection of reflective memoir and personal essays told from a genuine and unique voice about growing up and coming of age as a young gay Chinese man in Vancouver. Thoughtful and honest, the stories and essays recounted are...

Intimate Strangers

Intimate Strangers

Intimate Strangers: True Stories from Queer Asia Edited by Carmen Ho and Gregg Schroeder Family, love, friendship, acceptance—none of these pillars of happiness are certainties for LGBTQ+ people. Yet, despite social and legal conventions, the fifteen writers collected...

Sanctuary

Sanctuary

Sanctuary: Short Fiction from Queer Asia Edited by Libay Linsangan Cantor and Ng Yi-Sheng Gathered in this book are nineteen tales of queer lives in Asia: stories of humour and heartbreak; magic and murder; love, lust and living happily ever after. Meet an altar boy...

Insignificance

Insignificance

Synopsis: Sometimes what is remembered is best forgotten. This is the feeling that permeates Insignificance. The protagonists in these stories cannot help but recall their former Hong Kong existence, one that shimmers with beauty and pain. On September 26, 2014, the...

Heaven on Earth

Heaven on Earth

Synopsis: The year: sometime in the 2090s. The location: Jordan. Aging is reversible thanks to major advances in bioscience and nanotechnology. But in a world where eternal youth has become a reality, complications arise. Journalist Janna Abdallah is at the forefront...

Rural Liberties

Rural Liberties

Synopsis: Moralla, a fading seaside town on the ‘beautifully uncivilised’ Sapphire Coast of New South Wales, has won Australia’s Tidy Towns award for two years running. Now Rebecca Moore—the most beautiful, talented girl in town—is dead and there’s nothing tidy about...

A Garden Fed by Lightning

A Garden Fed by Lightning

Synopsis: Marshall Moore’s short fiction is propelled by a scathing wit and a dark imagination, and he does not shy away from taking readers down roads that are less traveled and rarely even mapped. In the title story, a con man cons a beguiling con artist… or does...

The Last Gods of Indochine

The Last Gods of Indochine

Synopsis: Jacquie Mouhot and Paaku the Lotus-Born are divided by six centuries but linked by a common curse. In medieval Cambodia, Paaku is an orphan whose community believes he may be a reluctant incarnation of a god, causing sectarian turmoil for the kingdom's...

The Bride of Amman

The Bride of Amman

Synopsis: The Bride of Amman, a huge and controversial bestseller when first published in Arabic, takes a sharp-eyed look at the intersecting lives of four women and one gay man in Jordan’s historic capital, Amman—a city deeply imbued with its nation’s traditions and...

The Worst Motorcycle in Laos: Rough Travels in Asia

The Worst Motorcycle in Laos: Rough Travels in Asia

Synopsis: In The Worst Motorcycle in Laos: Rough Travels in Asia, author Chris Tharp recounts his misadventures in countries across the region he’s called home for the last ten years. He takes us to the back-alley restaurants of Vietnam on a quest to eat cobra; to the...

The Prism of Life

The Prism of Life

   Note: This book is available in English and Chinese. Synopsis 本書簡介 What is the purpose of my life? If you have begun asking this question, you are ready to embark on your spiritual journey; you are ready for your spiritual awakening. The Prism of Life contains...

The Memory of a Face

The Memory of a Face

A novel about loving and letting go Note: This book is available in English and Chinese. Synopsis 本書簡介 What is love? Is it the craving to be with him or is it the realization that you should let him go? Is it about telling him how he makes you feel or is it about...

Always Forever

Always Forever

From the depths of sorrow begins a journey of hope. 從悲傷深淵出發,展開希望之旅。   Note: This book is available in English and Chinese. Synopsis 本書簡介 The dream of a life together is shattered when AD finds himself attending Mikee's funeral. He is overcome with grief. But Mikee's...

Speaking in Forked Tongues

Speaking in Forked Tongues

Synopsis Bren Barran is a normal guy in most ways. All he really wants is a sweet girlfriend and enough time and money to play videogames, but his job keeps getting in the way. After all, opening trans-dimensional gates to hell and summoning demons for money isn’t the...

How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit?

How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit?

Synopsis In this collection, twenty-six women reveal the truth about expatriate life in modern East Asia through original works of memoir and creative non-fiction. Their experiences are varied and unique, demonstrating that expat women's lives go far beyond the...

Handover

Handover

Meta: Author: Paul Blaney Publication date: December 1, 2012 E-book formats: ePub, Kindle, PDF Word count: 36,000 eISBN: 978-988-15539-9-7 Price (e-book): US$5.99 Synopsis: It's 1997 and three very different expatriate Britons are living and working in Hong Kong....

Tomorrow City

Tomorrow City

 Synopsis: After an armored car robbery goes horribly wrong and leaves four people dead, young ex-con Brendan Lavin flees New York City and attempts to start over again in Shanghai. But twelve years later, after opening a bakery under an assumed name and starting a...

Bitter Orange

Bitter Orange

Synopsis: Seth Harrington can be invisible or undetectable, but he is not a superhero. The ability only works in morally grey situations; the rest of the time, he can’t turn it on and off at will. He can use a movie ticket stub to buy a coffee or a one-dollar bill to...

Never Turn Away

Never Turn Away

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Synopsis: Never Turn Away is a collection of Marshall Moore’s work from the 10 years since his debut novel The Concrete Sky was published. Included are excerpts from that book and his second novel An...

Chronology of an Egg

Chronology of an Egg

Summary: Peter Tieryas Liu’s Chronology of an Egg is a companion to his debut Watering Heaven, published in October 2012 by Signal 8 Press in Hong Kong. Chronology of an Egg is a mini-collection containing five short stories -- two from Watering Heaven (“Gradients”...

An ideal for living

An ideal for living

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: Grace White and her brother Robert, overweight and affluent, are desperate to hang onto their respective love interests. Grace’s husband Rich is bonking every woman he can talk into bed. Grace...

Looking for Estrellita

Looking for Estrellita

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: Looking for Estrellita is a dazzling collection of essays full of new and important ideas. Castro explores foreignness, the multiplicity of the self, the business of writing and language, and...

The Unwalled City

The Unwalled City

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: Xu Xi, one of Hong Kong's preeminent novelists, examines the lives of four of the city's residents amid the tension and uncertainties leading up to the 1997 handover to China. Price: USD 5.99,...

Trio Sonata

Trio Sonata

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: A chance meeting over a dropped shop key opens a new world for Janna, the bright, attractive proprietress of a Ukranian cafe in Philadelphia's city centre. A decidedly straight woman on the eve...

Hellbent

Hellbent

Summary: Hellbent is a collection of short stories by Paul Blaney, author of Handover. Price: Free Author/Editor: Paul Blaney Publisher: Typhoon Media Ltd ISBN: 978-988-15540-9-3 Buy: E-books: (Free) Barnes & Noble: Apple Smashwords

The Concrete Sky

The Concrete Sky

Summary: While drunk at a party, Chad falls off a balcony and breaks his wrist. He comes to in a psych facility, under observation: His homophobic, obsessive older brother convinces the doctors that the fall was a suicidal jump... two other patients are dead... the...

The Bath Fugues

The Bath Fugues

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: From one of Australia's most lauded writers, comes a wonderfully wrought work, melding intrigue, romance, comedy and deception, taking the form of three interwoven novellas. Castro has won...

Stepper

Stepper

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: Tokyo, 1933. Tall, broodingly handsome, Victor Stepper is a consummate ladies' man, a brilliant journalist...and spy. As the world descends into war, Stepper collects information and sends it on...

Shanghai Dancing

Shanghai Dancing

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: After 40 years in Australia, Antonio Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness he calls "Shanghai Dancing," Antonio seeks to understand the source of...

Quill

Quill

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: A novel in two parts. Part I: Je Louse, 1999 "Beware of ex-lovers with quills", warns the preface of Elliot Bernard's new novel Je Louse. Blaise spent six torrid years with the world-famous...

Pussy’s Bow

Pussy’s Bow

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: Three gay men -- friends and roommates in a stunning Art Deco mansion -- have their lives tossed into turmoil when one of them is set upon by a gang of gay-bashing teens. When the other two...

Black Shapes in a Darkened Room

Black Shapes in a Darkened Room

Summary: Black Shapes in a Darkened Room is a collection of witty, visceral, and darkly imaginative short fiction from the author of the novel The Concrete Sky. Revenge and eroticism, humor and despair, the supernatural and the everyday... Marshall Moore draws new...

Chinese Walls

Chinese Walls

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: It’s the sixties. US sailors on R&R prowl the streets of the waterfront in Hong Kong where the Indonesian-Chinese Hsu family lives. "What’s a prostitute?" nine-year old Ai-Lin asks her older...

Daughters of Hui

Daughters of Hui

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: This collection of a novella and three stories was named one of the top ten "best books of Asia" of 1996 and won wide critical acclaim. Reviewers say the author "addresses the prudery of...

Glove Puppet

Glove Puppet

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: Vaslav is a boy with a sordid past and a tenuous future. Born 'Johnny' to a drug addict, prostitute mother in Brighton England, Johnny becomes Vaslav when, at age seven, his mother dies from a...

Hong Kong Rose

Hong Kong Rose

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: In October of 1987, Rose Kho, Hong Kong girl who left home, returned and has left it again for New York to escape her life, reflects, scotch in hand, as the sun sets on the Statue of Liberty....

Izzy and Eve

Izzy and Eve

Summary: It seems forever that Israel (Izzy) and Evangeline (Eve)—a gay man and his woman friend—have lived together while the city around them crumbles. He’s an erotic cartoonist; she makes exotic jewellery and works as a receptionist in one of the whorehouses in...

After China

After China

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: After China, is a novel which offers lasting pleasures through its rich combination of consummate story-telling, playfulness and wisdom. An architect meets a writer on a beach. He has escaped...

Drift

Drift

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: Through a fictional character, Byron Shelley Johnson, Castro ‘completes’ English experimental novelist Bryan Stanley Johnson's unfinished trilogy. The novel explores the interaction of...

The Garden Book

The Garden Book

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: Set in the Dandenongs of the 1930s, when Australia was facing a looming war, The Garden Book scrutinizes the obsessions, prejudices and sexual betrayals of the period, shedding a different light...

Six Positions

Six Positions

E-book reprinted and distributed in partnership with the author. Summary: Written with a poet's sense of language and the quirky voice of an outsider among outsiders, Six Positions takes the reader on a frank and entertaining international road trip of clubs, baths,...

Dispatches from the Peninsula: Six Years in South Korea

Dispatches from the Peninsula: Six Years in South Korea

By Chris Tharp Meta: Publication date: September 27, 2011 ISBN (print): 978-988-15161-1-4 eISBN: 978-988-15161-5-2 Paper edition specs: Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 perfect bound trade paperback Page count: coming soon E-book specs: Formats: ePub, mobi (Kindle), PDF Word...

When the de la Cruz Family Danced

When the de la Cruz Family Danced

By Donna Miscolta Meta: Publication date: June 28, 2011 ISBN (print): 978-988-19895-9-8 eISBN: 978-988-19895-2-9 Paper edition specs: Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 perfect bound trade paperback Page count: 342 E-book specs: Formats: ePub, mobi (Kindle), PDF Word count: 95,000...

River Dragon Sky

River Dragon Sky

By Justin Nicholes Meta: Publication date: June 12, 2012 Print edition: 8.5" x 5.5" perfect bound trade paperback Page count: 224 ISBN: 978-988-15538-0-5 Price: US$16.95 E-book formats: ePub, Kindle, PDF Word count: 60,000 eISBN: 978-988-15164-3-5 Price: US$7.99...

The Infernal Republic

The Infernal Republic

By Marshall Moore Meta: Publication date: February 14, 2012 Print edition: 8.5" x 5.5" perfect bound trade paperback Page count: 226 ISBN: 978-988-15164-0-4 Price: US$15.95 E-book formats: ePub, Kindle, PDF Word count: 67,000 eISBN: 978-988-15164-3-5 Synopsis: A...

Access

Access

  By Xu Xi Meta: Publication date: November 22, 2011 Print edition: 8.5" x 5.5" perfect bound trade paperback Page count: 214 ISBN: 978-988-15161-9-0 Price: US$15.95 E-book formats: ePub, mobi (Kindle), PDF Word count: 61,000 eISBN: 978-988-15161-2-1 Price: US$8.99...

Buddhist Meditation and the Internet: Practices and Possibilities

Buddhist Meditation and the Internet: Practices and Possibilities

By Joan Miller Meta: Publication date: August 7, 2012 Print edition: 8" x 5" perfect bound trade paperback Page count: TBD ISBN: 978-988-15538-7-4 Price (paper): US$11.95 E-book formats: ePub, Kindle, PDF Word count: 35,000 eISBN: 978-988-15538-4-3 Price (e-book):...

Rare Bird of Truth

Rare Bird of Truth

Synopsis: Virgil Mann is an Australian editor working in London who, via an unseemly brush with fate, has just become a publisher. Good luck? Bad luck? It's too early to tell. One thing is certain-nothing in his past has prepared him for the events about to unfold....