Review Excerpt:

There is no single authentic voice of Chinese fiction.  And that may very well be a good thing.

ONE clear fact emerged from the controversy over Gao Xingjian's Nobel prize for literature last October: an enormous—and increasingly hostile—divide exists between Chinese literature written and read in mainland China and that produced and consumed in the West. Chinese authors who went into exile in the 1980s, including Mr Gao, dominate perceptions of Chinese literature in western markets, but are largely ignored in China itself. Writers in China accuse the exiles of pandering to western fantasies about an exotically repressive China which is irrelevant to Chinese people today, while exiles denounce writers in China for selling out to the PRC's version of the market economy.

Whether a novel is written in China or in the West, dissidence is still the best recipe for hype: western audiences love whatever the Chinese government hates. Of the four books reviewed here, the only one written in China was “Shanghai Baby”, by Wei Hui (above right, followed clockwise by Annie Wang, Dai Sijie and Geling Yan). With its frank descriptions of sex and drugs in late-1990s Shanghai, it won widespread notoriety in China last year, and was eventually banned (a fact proudly advertised on its back cover, presumably to reassure the western reader that it must be worth buying). The book is now an international sensation, hailed as the hip new face of the Chinese avant-garde. …