page_title: David Rotenberg (author)
section_title: Novels
hierarchical_section_title: David Rotenberg (author) / Career / Author (1998- ) / Novels
caption_attribution_description: Where the Suzhou Creek (coming in from the right) runs into the Huangpu River—the main waterway through Shanghai—is the Monument to the People's Heroes erected in 1993 in the stylized shape of three rifles leaning against each other. It commemorates revolutionary martyrs plus those who have died fighting natural disasters. To the left on the far (eastern) side of the Huangpu River is the Oriental Pearl TV Tower (468m/1,535ft high) which became the tallest structure in China when completed in 1994. It is one of the first structures to rise in the Pudong [“East Bank”] New Area, a Special Economic Zone targeted to finance and trade established in 1993. On Google Earth: Monument to the People's Heroes 31°14'39.25&quot;N, 121°29'13.05&quot;E Oriental Pearl TV Tower 31°14'30.72&quot;N, 121°29'43.01&quot;E
context_page_description: David Charles Rotenberg, usually known as David Rotenberg, is a Canadian author and professor emeritus of theatre studies at York University, where he taught graduate students for over 25 years, as well at the Professional Actors Lab in Toronto, which he founded as the artistic director. David Rotenberg has been referred to as one of Canada's "most notable acting teachers and coaches," and may be the nation's best known master acting teacher. During the formative part of his career, he was a theatre director in New York City and staged two Broadway shows, returning to Toronto in 1987. In 1994, he directed the first Canadian play to be staged in the People's Republic of China, which inspired his career as a novelist, beginning with the five Zhong Fong mysteries set in modern Shanghai as well as the historical fiction novel Shanghai. After writing a series of speculative thrillers set in The Junction, Toronto, He began a science fiction series in 2017.
context_section_description: Rotenberg was inspired to write his first novel after his time with the Shanghai Theatre Academy, at a time when China was going through a "massive transition from a profoundly oppressive socialist state to a basically free market economy – a thrilling time." It set the stage for his critically acclaimed first novel, the thriller The Shanghai Murders (1998), followed by four more in his mystery series: The Lake Ching Murders (2001), The Hua Shan Hospital Murders (shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for the best crime novel of 2003), The Hamlet Murders (2004) and The Golden Mountain Murders (2005). The five Zhong Fong novels have "legions of fans around the world," and the series is reported as having been optioned for film and television (HBO).
  Just before The Golden Mountain Murders was published, the author received a lunch invitation from Penguin Canada publisher David Davidar and assumed that they would be discussing a sixth Zhong Fong novel, but Davidar had other ideas: "They wanted me to do for Shanghai what James Clavell had done for Hong Kong." The end result was Shanghai: The Ivory Compact (2008, "just in time for the Beijing Games"), his critically acclaimed epic novel spanning thousands of years. Rotenberg wrote it as three novels, and counts them as such, but Penguin decided to publish it in one volume. At about 800,000 words, it is one of the longest novels ever published; Rotenberg said he received complaints from readers that it was "too heavy for them to carry around". The success of Shanghai, according to Stephen Patrick Clare, demonstrated that Rotenberg could "break away from convention without loosening his hold on the imagination of his readers." The novel has been reported as being optioned by Darius Films and by Jane McLean for television.
  For his next novel series, The Junction Chronicles, Rotenberg moved away from the Shanghai setting in favour of The Junction, the Toronto neighbourhood where he grew up and to which he later returned, as, "it was finally time to look around and try to write about home." While the primary setting for the series is The Junction, a lot of the action in the first novel, The Placebo Effect (2012), takes place in New York, where Rotenberg also lived for many years. Robert J. Wiersema called it a "somewhat workmanlike" thriller "possessed of  an enthralling undercurrent that allows it to transcend its genre and shine on its own terms", and that Rotenberg "reveals a surprising depth and intricacy, not in the mechanics of his plot, but at the level of characterization." The same year, Peter Worthington included Rotenberg "among the best writers of their genre [the thriller,] in the English-speaking world today". The trilogy has been optioned by producer Don Kurt for television.
  In a 2012 interview, Rotenberg said he had been working on another trilogy for ten years, titled The Dream Navigators. Five years later, the first book of his third novel series, The Dream Chronicles, set in the future, was published by iBooks in 2017, followed by the second in 2019.
caption: Shanghai, viewed from The Bund, the principal setting of the Zhong Fong series.
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