9 Dream of Ding Village (丁庄梦)
By Yan Lianke
In 1994, Yan Lianke, the heavy-duty author best known for daring satire Serve the People!, received an anonymous letter alerting him to an HIV epidemic in his home province of Henan. The letter referred to the mid-1990s blood-selling scandal that saw peasants trading blood for cash.
The practice caused HIV infection to spread rampantly, with thousands affected. Yan spent three years undercover, visiting affected villages; the result was Dream of Ding Village, a fictional account of a community decimated. Translated into English in 2011 by Cindy Carter, the novel merges surrealism and reality to shocking effect.
8 The Good Earth
By Pearl S Buck
Pearl S Buck grew up in China in the early 1900s as the daughter of American missionaries. When she was 39 she published The Good Earth, a fictional cradle-to-grave biography of a Chinese farmer, Wang Lung. From humble beginnings, farmer Wang reverses his fortunes by marrying a slave girl from a prosperous household that eventually falls into disrepair, allowing Wang to take over the crumbling estate.
However, fortune does not bring the family the peace and stability they desire. An amazingly well-observed account of Chinese rural life at a time when the political order began to break down, The Good Earth went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1932, making Buck the first American woman to do so.
7 Cat Country (貓城記)
By Lao She
When Lao She, one of Beijing's greatest satirists, took his life in 1966, the world he left behind was a close echo of that which he depicted in Cat Country, perhaps his most prophetic novel. The dystopian fantasy world of the cat people – who live on Mars, speak Felinese and practise Everybody Shareskyism – was a thinly veiled, scorpion-tailed metaphor of the world around him as Communism found traction in 1920s and '30s China.
The book is considered by many to be China's first important work of science-fiction, and a 1970 English translation by William A Lyell was rereleased by Penguin Classics in 2013.
6 The Last Quarter of the Moon (额尔古纳河右岸)
By Chi Zijian
This is an evocative masterpiece by a young, award-winning writer who gives us an atmospheric, allegorical folk-tale of the Evenki (formerly known as Tungus), a nomadic tribe based in northeastern China that have not kept pace with the world. Their lives (like those of the reindeer they tend) are irretrievably disrupted by the forces of modernity.
The narrator is the 90-year-old, unnamed widow of one of the clan’s great chieftains. Her ethereal presence, memory and strength of will allow her to speak for the tribe, breathing life into their collective memories. This is a beautiful story: otherworldly, and with a pace that is slow but certain, as though the tale unfolds to the beat of an ancient, sonorous drum.
5 Fortress Besieged (围城)
By Qian Zhongshu
'Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside wanted to get in, and those who are inside want to get out.' This wry line, borrowed from a French proverb, is the opening sentence and basis of Qian Zhongshu's 1947 novel. The book's original name, Wei Cheng, has since become a popular byword for a stifling marriage in China.
The novel opens with the main character, Fang Hongjian, returning to China with a fake degree as the sole result of his 'studies' overseas. After a stint in Shanghai, he takes a teaching position in rural China. Things then take a turn for the worse when he loses his job and falls into a disastrous marriage. Caught between two eras, Fortress Besieged is the story of a man who ultimately gets crushed by the metaphorical fortress walls, 'not with a bang, but with a whimper'.
4 Red Sorghum (红高粱家族)
By Mo Yan
When Mo Yan collected his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, the Swedish Academy cited Red Sorghum as one of his most important works. Thanks to Zhang Yimou’s 1988 film adaptation, it is also the author's most commercially successful.
Set in a small village in 1930s Shandong province during the bloody Second Sino-Japanese War, the book chronicles three generations of family history in a turbulent era of battling warlords and lost fortunes. Through a series of vivid, often violent flashbacks, a nameless narrator introduces us to a hard-boiled wartime peasant existence. A brilliant introduction to one of China's most famous writers and his signature style, 'hallucinatory realism'.
3 Love in a Fallen City (傾城之戀)
By Eileen Chang
This year marks 23 years since the death of Eileen Chang, arguably China's most influential female writer. Born in Shanghai in 1920, Chang moved to Hong Kong to study before returning here just before Japanese troops invaded in 1937.
The two cities of Chang’s youth form the backdrop to Love in a Fallen City. Set in the 1940s, the plot follows Bai Liusu, an introverted divorcee who has recently broken free of an unhappy marriage but is largely shunned by her judgemental family for doing so. When a charming Malaysian businessman passes through town, Bai starts to feel there might be a way out.
The book echoes Chang's own tragic personal life – she married twice, divorcing her first husband, a Japanese collaborator and philanderer, in 1947 – and the author's observations perfectly capture the tensions and excesses of colonial Hong Kong and pre-1949 Shanghai.
2 To Live (活着)
By Yu Hua
To Live – another book on our list that was famously adapted into a film by Zhang Yimou – follows the story of Xu Fugui, the once lazy and rich son of a country landlord, as he fights to survive from before the founding of the People's Republic until the dying days of the Cultural Revolution. With the pathos of a Greek tragedy, it delivers a vivid rendering of Chinese life pre- and post-Cultural Revolution and upon publication announced Yu Hua as a master of his craft.
Yu’s unromantic worldview is partly a result of his upbringing during the Cultural Revolution. But in this novel, resilience and pragmatism rise to meet despair. It’s a veiled criticism of the Maoist era and a testament to the power of human endurance.
1 The Real Story of Ah Q and Other Tales of China (阿Q正传)