Ten Great Books set in CHINA

5th January 2022

China is the latest location for us to visit if our ‘Ten Great Books set in…’ series. Ten great books set in China. China, officially the People’s Republic of China, is a country in East Asia. It is the world’s most populous country, with a population of more than 1.4 billion. It spans five geographical time zones and borders 14 different countries, the second most of any country in the world after Russia

‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’ – Chinese proverb

Beautiful Country by J R Thornton

A coming-of-age story set in modern day China centering on the friendship between an American and a Chinese boy who meet while training with Beijing’s Junior National Tennis Team.

Chase Robertson arrives in Beijing as a fourteen-year-old boy still troubled by the recent death of his older brother. He discovers a country in transition; a society in which the dual systems of Communist Era state control and an emerging entrepreneurial culture exist in paradox.

A top ranked junior tennis player in the U.S., Chase joins the practices of the Beijing National Junior Tennis Team and is immersed in the brutal, cut-throat world of Chinese sport. It is a world in which gifted children are selected at the ages of six or seven for specialized sport schools where they devote their entire youth to the pursuit of athletic excellence and are paid as professionals by the state. Athletes find themselves compelled to do anything possible to succeed—right or wrong. Those who fail to reach the pinnacle are cast aside and are left facing a desperate future without hope.

In China, Chase gains access to a culture rarely open to Westerners, and soon finds himself caught up in secrets. When his closest friend and teammate turns to him for help, Chase is faced with the dilemma of what to do when friendship, rules, and morals are in conflict.

A big-hearted debut, Beautiful Country explores a friendship against the backdrop of a quickly changing country

Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong

Shanghai in 1990. An ancient city in a country that despite the massacre of Tiananmen Square is still in the tight grip of communist control. Chief Inspector Chen, a poet with a sound instinct for self-preservation, knows the city like few others.

When the body of a prominent Communist Party member is found, Chen is told to keep the party authorities informed about every lead. Also, he must keep the young woman’s murder out of the papers at all costs. When his investigation leads him to the decadent offspring of high-ranking officials, he finds himself instantly removed from the case and reassigned to another area.

Chen has a choice: bend to the party’s wishes and sacrifice his morals, or continue his investigation and risk dismissal from his job and from the party. Or worse . . .

Half the World Away by Cath Staincliffe

Newly graduated photography student Lori Maddox spends the year after university travelling and visits China where she finds work as a private English tutor. Back in Manchester, her parents Jo and Tom, who separated when Lori was a toddler, follow her adventures on her blog, ‘Lori In The Orient’.
Suddenly communication stops and when the silence persists a frantic Jo and Tom report her missing. It is impossible to find out anything from 5,000 miles away so they travel out to Chengdu, a city in the south-western province of Sichuan, to search for their daughter.

Landing in a totally unfamiliar country, with no knowledge of the customs or language, and receiving scant help from the local authorities, Jo and Tom are forced to turn detective, following in their daughter’s footsteps, tracing the people she mentioned in her posts, interviewing her friends, colleagues and students. It’s an unbearably difficult challenge and, as the days pass, the fear that Lori is lost for good grows ever larger.

Harbour Views by Philip Chatting

Norwegian expatriate Jakob Odergaard rules his successful furniture corporation with a ruthlessness and egotism that draws comment even in the merciless cut and thrust of the Hong Kong business world. His baleful influence warps the lives of all around him: his imperiously bitter wife Dagmar, his estranged hippyish daughter Sigrid, and his sexually frustrated administrator, Mrs Tung, among them. Not even the blithely laddish Anil Patel, a company courier, is immune. In this jet-black comedy, lives are as tangled, messy, and precarious as the back streets of Kowloon. In a world where ambition collides with passion, tradition with modernity, East with West, no one comes away unscathed. Only the city itself – from the hyper-commercial Central District to semi-rural Sai Kung, and from ramshackle apartment blocks to sea-washed temples – endures.

Mongkok Station by Jake Needham

Hong Kong is teetering on the edge of anarchy. Violent street battles are raging between riot police and mobs demanding democracy.

Samuel Tay is a legendary Singapore homicide detective. He’s retired, but it was purely involuntary. It seems his legend made a lot of senior officers uneasy and they wanted him gone. John August is an American who has shadowy connections to the intelligence community. He’s done Tay a lot of favors in the past, and Tay owes him one.

When August asks Tay to come to Hong Kong to track down the missing girl, Tay doesn’t much want to go. August and his friends deal in the fate of nations. Tay deals with personal tragedies, one human being at a time. Even worse, he doesn’t like Hong Kong and, to be completely honest, he’s not all that fond of Americans either.

Regardless, Tay answers August’s call for help. He’s a man who honors his debts, his forced retirement really sucks, and there’s this woman… well, there’s always a woman in there somewhere, isn’t there?

August thinks that the triads may have kidnapped the missing girl. Tay doesn’t have the sources to get inside the Hong Kong triads so August teams him up with Jack Shepherd, an American lawyer living in Hong Kong who just might be the only white guy on the planet the triads trust.

Tay is considerably less than thrilled by that. Here he is in a city that seems only moments away from going up in flames, everybody is certain the missing girl is dead, and now he’s stuck with all these Americans. Can things get any worse than that? Oh yes, they absolutely can.

Tay has developed symptoms that indicate he may be very seriously ill. For everybody, there is always a last time around the track whether they know it when they make the trip or not. As Tay’s symptoms worsen, it begins to dawn on him that this missing girl just might be his own last time around.

If this really is the end for him, Samuel Tay vows he’s going to go out with one hell of a bang.

The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne

I waited patiently for the next hand to be played out, and I had a feeling it was going to be a Natural, a perfect nine.’

His name is Lord Doyle.

His plan: to gamble away his last days in the dark and decadent casino halls of Macau.

His game: baccarat punto blanco — ‘that slutty dirty queen of casino card games.’

Though Doyle is not a Lord at all. He is a fake; a corrupt lawyer who has spent a career siphoning money from rich clients. And now he is on the run, determined to send the money – and himself – up in smoke.

So begins a beguiling, elliptical velvet rope of a plot: a sharp suit, yellow kid gloves, another naughty lemonade and an endless loop of small wins and losses. When Lady Luck arrives in the form of Dao-Ming, a beautiful yet enigmatic lost soul, so begins a spectacular and unnatural winning streak in which millions come Doyle’s way. But in these shadowy dens of risk and compulsion, in a land governed by superstition, Doyle knows that when the bets are high, the stakes are even greater.

The Ballad of a Small Player is a sleek, dark-hearted masterpiece: a ghost story set in the land of the living, and a decadent morality tale of a Faustian pact made, not with the devil, but with fortune’s fickle hand.

The Emperor of Shoes by Spencer Wise

From an exciting new voice in literary fiction, a transfixing story about an expatriate in southern China and his burgeoning relationship with a seamstress intent on inspiring dramatic political change.

Alex Cohen, a twenty-six-year-old Jewish Bostonian, is living in southern China, where his father runs their family-owned shoe factory. Alex reluctantly assumes the helm of the company, but as he explores the plant’s vast floors and assembly lines, he comes to a grim realization: employees are exploited, regulatory systems are corrupt and Alex’s own father is engaging in bribes to protect the bottom line. When Alex meets a seamstress named Ivy, his sympathies begin to shift. She is an embedded organizer of a pro-democratic Chinese party, secretly sowing dissonance among her fellow labourers. Will Alex remain loyal to his father and his heritage? Or will the sparks of revolution ignite?

Deftly plotted and vibrantly drawn, The Emperor of Shoes is a timely meditation on idealism, ambition, father-son rivalry and cultural revolution, set against a vivid backdrop of social and technological change.

The Eye of Jade by Diane Wei Lian

Mei, the protagonist, is an investigator. A friend of her mother, known as ‘Uncle Chen’, asks her to track down a Han-dynasty jade that vanished from a museum during the terrible upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. Was the jade a victim of the brutal, philistine Red Guards, ruthlessly shattering the great legacies of the past? Or are more complex subterfuges involved? As Mei digs deeper, she begins to unravel a series of labyrinthine mysteries – some with resonances even within her own family. Detective fiction is a much-plundered genre, both by genre practitioners and those with more literary aims – and it’s the latter writers who are more likely to come a cropper when attempting to reinvent the standard tropes of the field. But Diane Wei Liang avoids all such pitfalls. This is a provocative, intriguing and accomplished piece of writing.

Wild Swans by Jung Chan

Few books have had such an impact as Wild Swans: a popular bestseller which has sold more than 13 million copies and a critically acclaimed history of China; a tragic tale of nightmarish cruelty and an uplifting story of bravery and survival.

Through the story of three generations of women in her own family – the grandmother given to the warlord as a concubine, the Communist mother and the daughter herself – Jung Chang reveals the epic history of China’s twentieth century.

Breathtaking in its scope, unforgettable in its descriptions, this is a masterpiece which is extraordinary in every way.

A Dance with the Dragon by Julia Boyd

With its wild, dissolute, extravagant group of fossil hunters and philosophers, diplomats, dropouts, writers and explorers, missionaries, artists and refugees, Peking’s foreign community in the early 20th century was as exotic as the city itself. Always a magnet for larger than life individuals, Peking attracted characters as diverse as Reginald Johnston (tutor to the last emperor), Bertrand Russell, Pierre Loti, Rabrindranath Tagore, Sven Hedin, Peter Fleming, Wallis Simpson and Cecil Lewis. The last great capital to remain untouched by the modern world, Peking both entranced and horrified its foreign residents – the majority of whom lived cocooned inside the legation quarter, their own walled enclave, living an extraordinary high-octane party lifestyle, suffused with martinis, jazz piano and cigarettes, at the height of the Jazz Age. Ignoring the poverty outside their gates, they danced, played and squabbled among themselves, oblivious to the great political events unfolding around them and the storm clouds looming on the horizon that were to shape modern China. Others, more sensitive to Peking s cultural riches, discovered their paradise too late when it already stood on the brink of destruction. Although few in number, Peking’s expatriates were uniquely placed to chart the political upheavals – from Boxer Rebellion in 1900 to the Communist victory of 1949 that shaped modern China. Through extensive use of unpublished diaries and letters, Julia Boyd reveals the foreigner’s perceptions and reactions – their take on everyday life and the unforgettable events that occurred around them. This is a dazzling portrait of an eclectic foreign community and of China itself – a magnificent confection, never before told.

We hope you enjoy our selection of books set in China. If we have missed any of your favourites, please add them in the Comments below. We have over 240 books set in China in our data base!

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