'He's the most dangerous president we've ever had,' she says of Bush. 'We've got to get rid of him.'

While protesting outside the White House on March 8, the 62-year-old was handcuffed and driven away in a police van with Alice Walker, author of The Colour Purple, and 25 other members of the women's group Code Pink. Kingston spent four hours behind bars before police told her she had been cited on the wrong form and charges would be dropped.

'They do that to keep the cost down, to avoid clogging the courts and giving us too much publicity,' she says, adding journalists were prevented from covering the protest.

The arrest became the epilogue for The Fifth Book Of Peace.

'I started writing it during the first war in Iraq,' Kingston says from her home in Oakley, California. 'I began with one war and ended it with another one.

'There has always been a sense of emergency, a need to finish the book.'

That need thwarted and fuelled the stream-of-consciousness writing that flows from prose to poetry, song, memoir and history. The Fifth Book Of Peace melds Kingston's interest in her Chinese heritage - as seen in her non-fiction books China Men and Woman Warrior, which has sold more than a million copies - with the themes and characters of her poetry and first novel, 1989's Tripmaster Monkey.

It was inspired by three books of peace mentioned in Chinese legend. While living in Hong Kong in the 1980s and during travels in Asia she asked historians and searched museums and libraries for the books but failed to confirm their existence. No record of the books can be found after the Sung period of the 11th century, according to Kingston.

'I think they existed, she says. 'They were probably like Buddhist sutras . . . books that directed people on how to achieve a harmonious society.

'The idea is that there were three of them. That number is very specific, so I think one of them was probably a response to The Art Of War and maybe the others were religious texts or mythical visions.'

Kingston was already thinking about using her love for twisting mythology when she asked the writer and former central government culture minister Wang Meng about the ancient books.

'He told me that they did not exist. He said that it was in my mind, that I had made it up and it was up to me to write it. So I felt that I was charged by the culture minister.'

She had written 156 pages of The Fourth Book Of Peace when a firestorm tore through the Oakley-Berkeley Hills in October 1991. While describing herself as a Buddhist, Kingston says her faith fell short of allowing her to accept the loss of the manuscript as part of the Buddhist process of rebirth.

'The ability to care about fiction disappeared,' she says. 'I felt that I could not rewrite [The Fourth Book Of Peace]. After the fire I couldn't read.

'I did not want to use words to write fiction. Fiction is a very compassionate way of thinking. The fiction writer even cares about imaginary people. I didn't have that ability any more.

'I just wanted to care about myself. I just wanted to curl up in the corner and protect myself, like a child. I didn't want to write like a professional writer - for publication - but just for myself. I wanted to express my own weeping. I wanted to write not for the public but for myself in a diary-like way.'

Three years later she felt ready to face a reading audience again.

'It occurred to me that I would get a community of writers around me and we would create together. I thought this was especially important if I was going to write a book of peace about building a harmonious, loving community.

'I sent out a call to veterans of all wars. It was my theory that we could draw one another's pain out if we listened to one another and we wrote for one another.'

This year marks the first decade of her writing seminars with veterans. Most of those taking part are from the Vietnam War, but they also involve troops from the second world war, Korea, the Gulf, a woman from the Spanish Civil War and members of Californian street gangs.

'I feel that we will meet for the rest of our lives. People will come from each of the wars, and we will be there for them.

'There is antagonism. But everyone learns to understand other points of view. People learn to communicate with one another. They write poetry, fiction, their own stories.'

The fire and the writing groups became part of The Fifth Book Of Peace, as did much of Kingston's life. The novel continues the story of Wittman Ah Sing, the Chinese-American playwright of Tripmaster Monkey who is an amalgam of Kingston, the poet Walt Whitman and the characters of Kerouacian adventures.

'If I were a man I would be like Wittman,' she says. 'I have his personality. He has the kind of life I would have had if I were a man.'

Like Kingston's family, Wittman moves to Hawaii from Berkeley in the 1960s to escape an increasingly violent America.

During the past decade, Kingston has spoken of showing America how to grow up by taking Wittman into adulthood - of showing that Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and Holden Caulfield can become responsible men without losing their spirit.

'It was my goal to show Wittman as family man and to have him grow up and not be the adolescent kind of person that he was in Tripmaster Monkey.

'I wanted to show what happens when you get married and have a child; how one carries on a good, adult life.'

Kingston last spoke to The South China Post in November 1993. Addressing a writing group at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, she told of her hope that The Fifth Book Of Peace would 'be of a genre I have never heard of'.

Almost exactly a decade later she says that genre is 'peace book', and it is characterised by a structure that is 'very different from the excitement, the action, the explosive climaxes that we have in books and television shows today'.

'What I want to tell are stories that have non-violent but dramatic climaxes. Literature now links excitement and drama with violence. I think this book is very exciting, very dramatic and it finds ways for people to solve problems and confront one another in ways that achieve communication.'

The other key to the genre, she says, is the artist's willingness to re-invent myths.

'I believe that artists can change the myths that we live by. We can change the direction of them.

'Very often people say, 'We don't want a peaceful world - that would be boring.' To me that is a myth. Everyone keeps talking about excitement and everyone has to have an exciting life. I'd like to change art so that we can see that we can have drama, that we can have excitement and that that is peaceful.'

While regretting that the book was not released during the war in Iraq, she was happy to learn that in Britain The Fifth Book Of Peace is being publicised as the antidote to The Art Of War by Sun Tzu.

'I'd never thought of that, but it makes me feel good. I like it.

'I've heard that 5,000 copies of The Art Of War have been sent to the American troops. When I read that I thought that there wasn't a book of peace to send to the troops. A book of peace would not make them more vulnerable to bullets or dying in war. A book of peace would protect them.'

Kingston's publicity duties for her first book in 14 years should see her return to Hong Kong. She says she hopes to take part in the 2004 Hong Kong International Literary Festival.

Her father, a poet, scholar and calligrapher in Guangdong, emigrated to the United States in 1924. Her mother followed in 1939 with two of their children. Maxine, the oldest of six more children born in the US, was named after a lucky punter in the gambling house her family ran in Stockton, California. Her parents later bought a laundry in the area.

'I feel that I am a Chinese-American, she says. 'I can fell very clearly that my DNA is Han, that I am a Han person. I know that. I feel it physically. Americans work very hard at their identity. I am clear that I am a Chinese-American.'

Kingston says she looks forward to seeing how the arts have progressed in Hong Kong since she ran a writing workshop here 20 years ago.

'I found Hong Kong a very commercial, exciting city, but it was a hard place to live. There didn't seem to be an artistic writing community.

'I felt that if there was going to be an artistic community, then I was starting it.'

The Fifth Book of Peace will go on sale in Hong Kong this week.