The Mandarin Club

This satirical horror novel explores the intersection of beauty and wellness standards with social issues like classism, racism, and sexism. The protagonist is a Chinese-American former piano prodigy who, needing to pay for her badly injured parents' care, takes a job at a beauty startup and has increasingly has to conform to the ugly side of the industry.

The New York Times described it as "a meditation on vanity, the ways in which the pursuit of physical beauty can betray the other sources of beauty in one's life,"

This is a generational China book, and one of the definitive texts about the experience of being a foreigner in China. In the 1990s, Princeton graduate Peter Hessler spent two years teaching English in the remote, landlocked Sichuan Province while representing the Peace Corps.

The depth and quality of the writing, the historical insights and its value as a time capsule are evidence of why he was subsequently made China correspondent for The New Yorker.

This is the most enjoyable and quotable Chinese novel I have read in years.

A bestseller in China, it tears up the rules about story structure.

The viewpoint character grows up in a small village in south China listening to stories about the Colonel: some say he was a legendary wartime doctor, some say he was a traitor, still others say he is a wicked sex machine. The stories are bawdy and mesmerizing, always larger than life. Yet in reality, the Colonel is just a middle-aged man who loves his cat. And why on earth does everyone call him 'the Eunuch'?

Only years later, when the protagonist becomes a middle-aged man does he would look back and finally solve the puzzle of who the colonel really is.

Although it leads up to one of thre most controversial moments in modern Chinese history, this novel is really a coming-of-age comedy about life in post-Mao China, and the early stages of the economic miracle.

There is a particularly memorable character called Madam Macaw.