A debut novel set in Shanghai shows promise

Imagine what it would be like to lose the power of language. To understand all that goes on around you and not to be able to communicate with those you love. These are the themes of the debut novel by Ruiyan Xu, a Shanghainese who has lived in the US since the age of 10.

Her main character Li Jing has had the opposite trajectory. Li lived in America as a kid before moving back to his native Shanghai. Happily married with a son, Li’s life is on a steep upward curve as his brains and application see him running an investment company and making big money. Then a gas explosion leaves him with a strange form of aphasia; he can no longer speak, read or write Chinese. All he’s left with is English, the language he first spoke but hasn’t used for decades. He can understand what people say, but can’t respond. Lying in hospital, he withdraws into himself.

When a Billion Chinese Jump (reviewed here) looks at the lengthy list of nightmarish environmental crises both ongoing and pending in China. Author Jonathan Watts talked to us about his book and the conclusions writing it led him to.

Book review: When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind – Or Destroy It

This book is getting a lot of attention, and deservedly so. Guardian correspondent Jonathan Watts traveled around China investigating the environmental effects of the last 30 years of incredible economic growth, and found plenty to despair about. The damage started even earlier in fact, and Watts persuasively shows that the Great Leap Forward was even more disastrous than thought.

Hilary Spurling’s biography of the famed author is a gem

Pearl Buck occupies a strange place in literature. To quote The New York Times, “In China she is admired but not read, and in America she is read but not admired.” The critical consensus is that her bestselling novels were overpraised at the time, and her 1938 Nobel Prize now provokes a collective wince from the academy. In this thoughtful and subtle new biography, focusing primarily on Buck’s time in China, Hilary Spurling (winner of the 2006 Whitbread Prize) pushes back against this conventional wisdom.

Glamour Bar’s mini lit line-up promises clever conversation

"A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet,” Truman Capote once mused. It would take a bold person to argue with that (or Truman Capote), so let’s just say that this month the insufficiency of good conversation is about to be temporarily alleviated thanks to Glamour Bar’s ‘Cosmopolitan Conversations’ series.