Historic Shanghai Book Club

There’s no book club this month, so it’s the perfect time to catch up on some summer reading from our 2026 list, or archive.

Wang Anyi is one of the finest Chinese novelists writing about the post-1949 era. The book club has read two of her novels previously—Song of Everlasting Sorrow, set between the 1930s and 1980s, and Fu Ping, set in the 1950s—and each time, her work has been a popular favorite. This collection of two novellas and three short stories covers a more recent time: set at the turn of the millennium, it features nuanced portrayals of life during a time of economic and cultural change. 

A young artist's life spirals out of control when she drops out of school to pursue a series of unfulfilling relationships with foreign men. A performance troupe struggles to adapt to a changing China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. The head of an isolated village arranges a youth's posthumous marriage to an unknown soldier, only to have the soldier's former lover unexpectedly turn up. A fun trip takes an unexpected turn when two young women are kidnapped and sold off as brides. A boy's bout with typhoid provides an intimate look at family life in Shanghai's longtang alleys.

  September

Tash Aw turns the classic immigrant narrative around in Five Star Billionaire: his characters are all Malaysians chasing their dreams in the region’s city of hope, Shanghai. Aw wrote much of the novel at a Shanghai writers’ residency based in Shanghai’s sprawling Embankment Building, and this is the locus of much of the action—an ideal setting to depict a vast swath of society. He’s a talented writer and Five Star Billionaire is a dazzling, kaleidoscopic novel that brings rare insights into the world of modern, modernizing Shanghai.

Phoebe is a factory girl who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job—but when she arrives she discovers that the job doesn’t exist. Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family’s real estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harbored a crush on Yinghui, a poetry-loving, left-wing activist who has reinvented herself as a successful Shanghai businesswoman. Yinghui is about to make a deal with the shadowy Walter Chao, the five star billionaire of the novel, who with his secrets and his schemes has a hand in the lives of each of the characters. All bring their dreams and hopes to Shanghai, the shining symbol of the New China, which, like the novel’s characters, is constantly in flux and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants.

Five Star Billionaire is a dazzling, kaleidoscopic novel that offers rare insight into the booming world of Shanghai, a city of elusive identities and ever-changing skylines, of grand ambitions and outsize dreams. Bursting with energy, contradictions, and the promise of possibility, Tash Aw’s remarkable book is both poignant and comic, exotic and familiar, cutting-edge and classic, suspenseful and yet beautifully unhurried.

What better than a murder mystery for Halloween month? Detective fiction is one of the best ways of getting to know a city, and MJ Lee knows his 1920s Shanghai. Great characters, plot, and an authentic sense of place. 

Shanghai, 1928. The body of a blonde is washed up on the Beach of Dead Babies, in the heart of the smog-filled city. Seemingly a suicide, a closer inspection reveals a darker motive: the corpse has been weighed down, it’s lower half mutilated…and the Chinese character for ‘justice’ carved into the chest.

The moment Inspector Danilov lays eyes on the dismembered body, he realises that he has an exceptional case on his hands. And when the first body is followed by another, and another, each displaying a new, bloody message, he has no option but face the truth. He is dealing with the worst kind of criminal; someone determined, twisted…and vengeful. The Inspector Danilov series is one of our absolute favorites: for the characters, the plot, the history, and the authentic sense of place.

  November

Qiu Xiaolong was born and raised in a Shanghai lane neighborhood, much like his Inspector Chen. Unlike October’s book, set in the 1920s with mostly foreigners, Qiu’s are novels of contemporary China. Inspector Chen tackles modern-day issues, often using the past to illuminate the present. Red Mandarin Dress is set in and around the former French Concession, in places that will be familiar to Shanghai readers.

A serial killer is stalking the young women of Shanghai. The killer's calling card is to leave the victims' bodies in well trafficked locations, each of them redressed in a red mandarin dress. With the newspapers screaming about Shanghai's first serial killer, Party officials anxious for a quick resolution, and the police under pressure from all sides, something has to give.

Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Department, a rising party cadre, is often put in charge of politically sensitive cases. But this time, there's a catch―Chen is on leave, ostensibly to study for his Master's degree, but also to sidestep being dragged into a messy corruption case with political overtones.

But when the murderer strikes directly at the investigative team itself, Chen must take over the investigation himself discovering that this, his most dangerous and sensitive case to date, has roots that reach back to the country's tumultuous recent past.