You be the judge!

 Western China, 1196: Yun Cai, a handsome and adored poet in his youth, is now an old man, exiled to his family estates. All that is left to him are regrets of a growing sense of futility and helplessness and the irritations of his feckless son and shrewish daughter-in-law. But the 'poison dragons' of misfortune shatter his orderly existence.
First, Yun Cai's village is threatened with destruction by a vicious civil war. His wayward second son, a brutal rebel officer seems determined to ruin his entire family. Meanwhile, Yun Cai struggles to free an old friend, P'ei Ti, from a hellish prison- no easy task when P'ei Ti is the rebels' most valuable hostage and Yun Cai considers himself merely a spent, and increasingly frightened old man.
Author’s Bio
Tim Murgatroyd is an English teacher who lives with his family in York. He has remained fascinated by ancient China since his teens, when he discovered a slim volume of Chinese poetry in a second hand bookshop. Taming Poison Dragons is his first novel. Gripping from beginning to end,  the style is quite unusual – it is fauvism revealing much deeper layers beneath. It's difficult to write characters from the distant past and from an obscure culture in transparent modern English, but Murgatroyd has cracked it.  A truly epic story.

He is currently engaged in writing a sequel chronicling the turbulent events of the Mongol invasion of China.