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In 1935 Paul Leung, a promising engineering student, finds himself attracted to the austere life of a Cistercian monk. He leaves his family and girlfriend Margaret, to join the Monastery of Our lady of Consolation in the Beijing mountains. During unsettled times, large areas of the country are under Japanese occupation leading up to World War Two. Paul and the other monks survive, only for the monastery to be destroyed by the Communists in the vicious civil war which follows. A small group of monks escape to Hong Kong where they re-found their monastery. Father Paul decides to make the perilous journey across China to join them, and on the way endures hard labour, privation and brutality. En route to Hong Kong Father Paul and Margaret meet again, and after everything he has been through, he faces one last agonising choice. Is his love stronger for God, or for a woman?

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Mark Cheng was born in Hong Kong in 1930, the eldest of nine children. Following the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in 1941, he and his family fled to China in 1942. They were a part of a large population movement which tried to escape from Japanese controlled areas of China. While his family remained in unoccupied China, Mark and his old headmaster and some friends eventually finished up in Bombay, India. Inspired by his teachers from school, Mark was drawn to a religious life, and entered a Jesuit noviciate in 1949. After two years, however, he realised that Jesuit life was not for him, and he left the noviciate to train as a teacher. He met his wife at college. They married in 1957 and started a family. With the dawning realisation that Hong Kong would eventually be handed to China, Mark and his family decided to uproot themselves from Hong Kong. While his parents and his siblings decided to move to North America, Mark brought his family to the United Kingdom where he has remained ever since. He retired from teaching in 1991. Mark and his wife Irene have been married for 56 years and have a son and a daughter and five grandchildren. He has been involved with music, and since 2005 has been a member of an artists' co-operative in Bedford where he lives. 'Father Paul's War' is his first novel.

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