In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland And the Transformation Of Rural China

In the vast tundra of Manchuria, in China’s Northeast, farming is still very much a part of the landscape, the biting winters affording just enough of a window for harvesting rice. The small town of Wasteland is where Frances, the author’s wife is from, and it is where Meyer spends a year chronicling not just the farming season but the impending irreversible changes soon to come knocking. This is a breathless and lively tour of Manchuria’s history and China’s evolving agrarian policies told through the eyes of a veteran investigative reporter. A side of the Asian behemoth not often seen.

A Map Of Betrayal by Ha Jin

Looking for closure, American Lilian Shang travels to China to find the family her father Gary left behind as he rose to prominence, becoming a high-level mole embedded in the CIA -- a valuable officer in the Chinese espionage apparatus. Narrating a story that alternates between Lillian’s path to discovery and Gary Shang’s complicated map of betrayal, Ha Jin’s melancholic novel is a moving meditation on the fluid definition of allegiance and home. Seemingly based on the life of real-life Chinese spy, Larry Chin, Jin’s prose sometimes cuts too close to the bone. Yet its lessons are universal and heartbreaking.

The Ten Thousand Things by John Spurling

"Writing Books Under the Pine Trees," the gorgeous landscape painting that graces the cover of this lyrical novel, is by Wang Meng, a Chinese painter during the Yuan dynasty. The story is a fictionalized account of the political upheavals in the country seen through Wang’s eyes. An eye-opening "travelogue" as intricately detailed as any landscape painting, The Ten Thousand Things beautifully weaves weighty issues such as religion, philosophy and art. John Spurling’s superb novel might be set in fourteenth-century China but the principal question it addresses -- what happens when duty and passion collide -- remains as relevant as ever.