Isham Cook
Sweeping history of Shanghai and its foreign movers and personalities in the early decades of the 20th century.
Curious attack on the atheists by a (presumably non-believing) leftist; really about the appropriate anti-imperialist rhetoric to be adopted.
Most are familiar with the movie, but the novel is well worthwhile for its eyewitness veracity and attention to period detail.
The narrative and (lack of) dialogue failed to hold me in this somewhat moralistic account of prostitution in 19th-century France.
Krystle Cole was an insider in the extraordinary life of the acid chemist William Leonard Pickard - if she only had an editor!
A British eccentric insists on walking across China despite all efforts by locals to put him in a palanquin.
As entertaining as French's book is, it's built on sheer fictionalization and gothic embellishments; read Graeme Sheppard's A Death in Peking for a debunking.
A foreign hippie community descends on a rural backwater in southwestern China for a momentous culture clash.
Meandering accounts of the author's dating and love affairs in China, shapeless narrative, lack of editing.
Novelistic masterpiece about two families which unfolds in delicate layers down to the ugly core.