"PAYING THE PRICE," BY MADGE WALLS; DIALOGUE PUBLISHING, $15.95

Former Hawai'i real-estate woman Madge Walls is now a novelist. Just out is her first book, about a Maui real-estate deal that goes awry.

A Punahou graduate and the granddaughter of artist Madge Tennent, Walls says in a news release that the book is "loosely based on my own career. I wrote it as I lived it for 14 years — the good, the bad and the crazy. I was a single mom with three children to educate, and I saw no other way to do it on the island."

Walls wrote the novel in defense of Realtors. "You rarely find a Realtor as a main character in fiction," she says. "Yet in real life, they get involved in all kinds of outrageous professional situations. ... I just know that over a million members of the National Association of Realtors are waiting for a story in which a Realtor is a good person."

Protagonist Laura Daniel, a Realtor, of course, deals with a wayward daughter and intractable buyers and sellers. The subtext of the story, says Walls, is "life as a haole with deep Island roots."

Now living in Colorado, to be closer to her three sons, Walls found that people on the Mainland were riveted by her stories of growing up in Hawai'i. "Paying the Price" isn't the first tale she has told — Walls was a freelance writer for the Maui News and in 1997 won the Maui Writers Guild short-story contest. In addition, her "Hawaii Real Estate Exam Book: A Study Guide to the State Section of the Hawaii Real Estate Salesperson Exam" is in its 8th edition. She's already working on a sequel to her debut novela.

"Sparrows, Bedbugs and Body Shadows: A Memoir," by Sheldon Lou; University of Hawai'i Press, $21

"My life during grade school was relatively peaceful, peaceful but boring, until Our Great Leader Chairman Mao initiated the great sparrow eradication campaign in the spring of 1958," writes Sheldon Lou in his new memoir.

Lou was born in Sichuan in 1941 and raised in Beijing, according to a news release, and his book is a personal look at China's dream of a communist paradise. It also documents how people survived or perished during turbulent times.

The Qinghua University graduate was ordered to work in a factory in Inner Mongolia. Lou recounts his six years there, separated from his family. The book ends with Lou's arrival in the United States in 1980. Today he is professor of operations management at California State University-San Marcos. "Sparrow, Bedbugs, and Body Shadows" is part of the Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies series.