Paul Hattaway Books in Order

If you want the book most people start with: The Heavenly Man
If you want Paul's own story: An Asian Harvest
If you want the big picture on China's peoples and churches: Operation China → Back to Jerusalem
If you want his regional church histories: Shandong → Guizhou → Zhejiang → Tibet

Paul Hattaway was born and raised in New Zealand, and left home at sixteen. Before he wrote books about China and the wider Asian church, he spent a rough stretch in Australia, doing odd jobs and sleeping rough at times while trying to work out what to do with his life.

Everything changed in 1987.

That was the year he became a Christian after a coworker invited him to church. Soon after, he felt drawn toward China. In 1988 he arrived in Hong Kong with a backpack, a single contact, and a small amount of money, and before long he was carrying Bibles across the border for believers who had little access to them.

That border-crossing work shaped the rest of his life. It also gave him something many writers never get, years of first-hand contact with pastors, evangelists, and house church networks whose stories were rarely told outside China. Hattaway gradually became known less as an outside commentator and more as a careful listener with a long memory.

Then came the books.

Many readers first meet him through The Heavenly Man, the life story of Brother Yun. That book follows prison, persecution, escape, and stubborn faith in China's house church movement, and it helped introduce many readers to stories they had never heard before. Hattaway later wrote Back to Jerusalem, which explores the missionary vision carried by some Chinese house church leaders, and Operation China, a major reference work on the country's many people groups.

He also widened the lens. Peoples of the Buddhist World gathers profiles of Buddhist communities across Asia, while From Head-hunters to Church Planters looks at revival in Nagaland. In China's Christian Martyrs and China's Book of Martyrs, he turns to long-form historical research, collecting lives, letters, and episodes of suffering that stretch across centuries. These books are not light reading, but they show the two sides of his work, storyteller and researcher.

His own memoir, An Asian Harvest, pulls the camera back onto his life. It follows the road from New Zealand teenager to Bible courier, missionary, and founder of Asia Harvest, a ministry he traces back to a life-changing experience in Nepal in 1991. The organization went on to support local missionaries and distribute millions of Bibles across Asia, including more than 10 million in China.

A lot of Hattaway's work circles the same themes. Hidden churches. Remote people groups. Costly faith. The spread of Christianity under pressure. He writes often about places like Henan, Shandong, Guizhou, Zhejiang, and Tibet, not as abstract regions on a map, but as places filled with local histories, rival movements, ordinary believers, and hard choices. In the China Chronicles volumes, he follows growth decade by decade, from early missionaries to modern house churches.

Hattaway still leads Asia Harvest and keeps a low public profile because of the sensitive nature of the work he has been involved in for decades. That suits the tone of his writing. He rarely places himself at the center for long. Even in his own memoir, the stronger pull is toward the people he met, the churches he served, and the stubborn hope that runs through all of his books.