Books from China
141 popular chinese books
Travel the world without leaving your chair.
The target of the Read Around The World Challenge is to read at least one book written by an author from each and every country in the world.
All books that are listed here as part of the "Read Around Asia Challenge" were written by authors from China.
Find a great book for the next part of your reading journey around the world from this book list. The following popular books have been recommended so far.
61.
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan EN
Description:
One of the Nobel Prize Winners in Literature Ideal for fans of Chinese Playground, We Are Party People, Death of Me, Skate with Me, A Farmer’s Life for Me, and similar works Written by today’s most revered, controversial, and feared Chinese novelist Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is a remarkable story. The absurd, real, comical, and tragic are combined into a fantastic read. The hero—or antihero—is Ximen Nao, a landowner known for his kindness to his peasants. His tale is a heart-wrenching and unique journey and completely riveting tale that shares the author’s love of a homeland c... continue
62.
Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang EN
Description:
Masterful short works about passion, family, and human relationships by one of the greatest writers of 20th century China. A New York Review Books Original “[A] giant of modern Chinese literature” –The New York Times "With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers c... continue
63.
Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang EN
Description:
In 1940s Shanghai, beautiful young Jiazhi spends her days playing mahjong and drinking tea with high society ladies. But China is occupied by invading Japanese forces and things are not always what they seem in wartime. Jiazhi’s life is a front. A patriotic student radical, her mission is to seduce a powerful employee of the occupying government and lead him to the assassin’s bullet. Yet as she waits for him to arrive at their liaison, Jiazhi begins to wonder if she is cut out to be a femme fatale and coldly take Mr Yi to his death. Or is she beginning to fall in love with him? A passionate ta... continue
64.
Lust, Caution by Ailing Zhang EN
Description:
An espionage thriller set against the backdrop of World War II Shanghai recounts the relationship between Mr. Yee, a powerful political figure, and Wang Jiazhi, a young woman who is swept up in a perilous game of emotional intrigue with Mr. Yee, in a volume that is accompanied by the screenplay for the film, an essay on the making of the film, and film stills. Simultaneous. (A Focus Features film, written by James Schamus & Wang Hui-Ling, directed by Ang Lee, releasing September 2007) (Performing Arts)
65.
Mao's Last Dancer by Li Cunxin EN
Description:
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER The extraordinary memoir of a peasant boy raised in rural Maoist China who was plucked from his village to study ballet and went on to become one of the greatest dancers of his generation. From a desperately poor village in northeast China, at age eleven, Li Cunxin was chosen by Madame Mao's cultural delegates to be taken from his rural home and brought to Beijing, where he would study ballet. In 1979, the young dancer arrived in Texas as part of a cultural exchange, only to fall in love with America-and with an American woman. Two years later, through a series of ... continue
66.
Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother : Stories of Loss and Love by Xinran EN
Description:
The stories of Chinese mothers whose daughters have been wrenched from them, and also brings us the voices of some adoptive mothers from different parts of the world. These are stories which Xinran could not bring herself to tell previously - because they were too painful and close to home.
67.
Description:
From the author of 'The Good Women of China' comes the uplifting story of three sisters who, like so many migrant workers in today's China, leave their peasant community to seek their fortune in the big city.
68.
Monkey King : Journey to the West (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Wu Cheng EN
Description:
Before there was The Lord of the Rings, there was China's Monkey King, one of the all-time great fantasy novels--which Neil Gaiman has said "is in the DNA of 1.5 billion people"--now published in a thrilling new one-volume translation with an illustrated foreword by Gene Luen Yang A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper A shape-shifting trickster on a kung-fu quest for eternal life, Sun Wukong, or Monkey King, is one of the most memorable superheroes in world literature, known to legions of fans of the most popular anime of all time, Dragon Ball, and the world's la... continue
69.
Monkey: The Journey To The West by Wu Cheng-en EN
Description:
Immensely popular in the Far East, combines elements of the of picaresque novel with folk epic in a mix of satire, allegory, and history in which Monkey encounters major and minor spirits, gods, demigods, demons, ogres, monsters, and fairies.
70.
Description:
Lilia Liska is eighty-one. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the birth of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press- the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Drawn into an obsession over this fragment of intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own, rather different version of events. Gradually she undercuts Roland's charming but arrogant voice with her sharply incisive and deeply moving commentary. She reve... continue