Best China Books

The Good Earth is a novel by Pearl S. Buck published in 1931 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932. The novel helped prepare Americans of the 1930s to consider Chinese as allies in the coming war with Japan.

Dream of the Red Chamber, composed by Cao Xueqin, is one of China's Four Great Classical Novels. It was composed sometime in the middle of the 18th century during the Qing Dynasty. It is a masterpiece of Chinese vernacular literature and is generally acknowledged to be the pinnacle of classical Chinese novels.

Journey to the West is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. The novel is a fictionalised account of the legendary pilgrimage to India of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang. The monk travelled to the "Western Regions" during the Tang dynasty, to obtain sacred texts (sūtras).

Red Azalea is the memoir of Chinese American writer Anchee Min (b. 1957). It was written during the first eight years she spent in the United States, from 1984 to 1992, and tells the story of her life in China. This is an honest and frightening memoir of growing up in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a 2005 novel by Lisa See set in nineteenth century China. Lily at 80 reflects on her life, beginning with her daughter days in 19th-century rural China.

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China is an autobiographical family history by Chinese writer Jung Chang. First published in 1991, Wild Swans contains a biography of the three female generations of Chang's family: her grandmother, her mother and finally her own autobiography.

Life and Death in Shanghai is an autobiography published in November 1987 by Nien Cheng from exile in the United States which details Cheng's six-year imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. The book tells the story of Cheng's arrest during the first days of the Cultural Revolution, her imprisonment, release, persecution, efforts to leave China, and early life in exile.

The Joy Luck Club is a best-selling novel written by Amy Tan in 1989. It focuses on four Chinese American immigrant families in San Francisco, California who start a club known as "the Joy Luck Club," playing the Chinese game of mahjong for money while feasting on a variety of foods.

Over the course of 2 years and 35,000 miles, photojournalist Tom Carter captured it ALL on film. Carter's anthropological-like study of China stands apart in its genre, as it focuses expressly on the PEOPLE of China. In addition to documenting the everyday life of "ordinary" people, Carter also backpacked to the most remote areas of China to observe reclusive ethnic minorities.

In 1996, 26-year-old Peter Hessler arrived in Fuling, a town on China's Yangtze River, to begin a two-year Peace Corps stint as a teacher at the local college. Along with another teacher, the two are the first foreigners to be in this part of the Sichuan province for 50 years.