Book Club
Exploring Shanghai’s rich history through books
About
“Shanghai is too complicated to be understood with the naked eye. It needs to be read.”
And that’s what we do at the Historic Shanghai Book Club: read the multi-layered story of this city and her people, from different perspectives, genres, and periods of history. After all, the history of this cosmopolitan metropolis, where east and west, communism and capitalism, tradition and revolution coexisted could never be told with a single story, a single book.
What We’ll Read
Our focus is always Shanghai, and history. We’ll read books written during the Old Shanghai era, from the many different perspectives that made up the city. We’ll also read well-researched contemporary work: historical fiction, and nonfiction in a variety of genres.
Who Should Come
Anyone interested in finding out more about the incredible history of this city. No prior knowledge of Shanghai history (or literature, for that matter) is required!
Book & Author Walks
Whenever possible, we’ll pair the book with a walk, so we can walk in the footsteps of the characters we’re reading about, and see the places they’ve described in their work.
How It Works
We’ll generally meet on the third weekend of each month, but that will vary depending on guest speaker schedules. We’ll discuss the book first, and, whenever possible, have the author or an expert on their work join us after that.
Not in Shanghai? Join us on Zoom! Email info@historic-shanghai.com for the link.
Do you have to have read the book to come? YES! YES! YES! And contribute to the discussion, too. A book club’s only as good as the quality of the discussion.
The Rules [in brief]
- Buy the book. (NO pirated copies!)
- Read the book.
- Contribute to the discussion.
Getting Books
Books are available in e-book format on Amazon and Kindle/ibook (although this can vary depending on the country to which your Kindle account is linked). Note that hard copies are increasingly difficult to come by in Shanghai. When books are available locally, we’ll note that under that month’s selection.
ALSO – and this is very important – do not ever, ever share pirated copies of books in the group. Writers need to make a living. Buy the books and support the writers who create them. We Support Writers! Please buy the book!
Cost
RMB 100 members
RMB 200 non-members per session
Book Club List: 2026
Descriptions below
January-February: SHANGHAI by Joseph Kanon
March: TIME TUNNEL by Eileen Chang
April: THE MASTER JEWELER by Weina Dai Randal
May: MASQUERADE by Mike Fu
June: FORTRESS BESEIGED by Qian Zhongshu
August: I LOVE BILL and Other Stories by Wang Anyi
September: FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE by Tash Aw
October: DEATH IN SHANGHAI by MJ Lee
November: RED MANDARIN DRESS by Qiu Xiaolong
For a list of books previously read, visit our Book Club Archive.
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2026
SHANGHAI by Joseph Kanon (2024)
BOOK CLUB MEETING: Saturday January 31, 3pm
Another book about Shanghai’s Jewish refugees? This one though, is not a memoir or an academic treatise, but a thriller by a New York Times bestselling author. Joseph Kanon specializes in spy novels set around World II, and now he turns his attention to wartime Shanghai and the story of Daniel Lohr.
Daniel Lohr was lucky: lucky enough to have escaped the Gestapo when his colleagues in the resistance were captured. Lucky to have an uncle—albeit a shady one–in Shanghai, because it’s through this connection that he is granted passage to Shanghai – he must deliver a parcel containing who knows what. Lucky to meet a young woman and have a shipboard romance en route.
Arriving in Shanghai penniless and stateless, Daniel tries to navigate his way through the city’s fabled nightlife through the launch of his uncle’s new nightclub–Shanghai’s biggest and glitziest–but he finds himself increasingly ensnared in the terrifying underworld that is wartime Shanghai, a maze where politics and crime are two sides of the same shiny coin. The trick, his uncle tells him, is to stay one step ahead. But how do you stay ahead of murder? How do you outrun your own past?
Available on Kindle. Hard copies are not available in Shanghai.
MARCH 2026
TIME TUNNEL by Eileen Chang (translation, 2025)
BOOK CLUB MEETING: Saturday March 21, 7pm.
Translators Karen Kingsbury and Jie Zhang will join us
Can we ever get enough of Eileen Chang, the quintessential Shanghai writer? Chang died in 1995, so it’s an unexpected pleasure to see this new collection of stories and essays from every part of her life, from wartime Shanghai to Hong Kong and the last years in America.
“Genesis,” left out of the two volumes of stories with which Chang made her name in the 1940s, shows her transfixing eye for visual detail and aptitude for brilliant verbal description, even as it looks forward to the improvisatory, open-ended approach to narrative she developed in later years. “Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift” addresses the perils and uncertainties–the vertigo–of exile, while in the late masterpiece “Those Old Schoolmates They’re All Quite Classy Now,” Chang looks back across the better part of a lifetime to the world she came from and the changes that have come with the years.
Essays like “A Return to the Frontier” and “New England Is China,” both written in English, broaden our wonder at the effervescent and melancholy genius of a transformative modern writer.
Available on Kindle. Hard copies are not available in China.
APRIL 2026
THE MASTER JEWELER by Weina Dai Randel (2025)
In 1925 Harbin, Anyu finds an exquisite Fabergé egg, half-concealed in the snow. She returns it to the very grateful owner, Isaac Mandelburg, who turns out to be a former master jeweler for the Russian royals. He’s on his way to Shanghai to work at his uncle’s jewelry shop.
Fate brings them together again in Shanghai, and Anyu begins apprenticing as a jeweler for Isaac. But this is 1920s Shanghai, after all, and Anyu soon becomes entangled in the dark side of the glamorous city, a world of gangsters, obsessive collectors, and vicious rivals.
The Master Jeweler is the third in Randel’s series of novel set during wartime China, two of them in Shanghai, and all with Chinese and Jewish characters, including historical figures. Randel can spin a good story, but an important caveat for readers is that historical accuracy is not her strong suit—despite the fact that she writes historical fiction peppered with historical characters!
Available on Kindle. Hard copies not available in China.
MAY 2026
MASQUERADE by Mike Fu (2024)
Mike Fu’s coming-of-age novel, set between New York and Shanghai, moves between worlds and time periods. Newly single Meadow Liu is house-sitting for his friend, artist Selma Shimizu, when he stumbles upon The Masquerade, a novel about an opulent masked ball in late 1930s Shanghai. The author’s name is the same as Meadow’s, Liu Tian—a coincidence that proves to be the first of many strange happenings. Over the course of a single summer, Meadow must contend with a possibly haunted apartment, a mirror that plays tricks, a stranger speaking in riddles at the bar where he works, as well as a startling revelation about a former lover. And when Selma vanishes from her artist residency in Shanghai, Meadow is forced to question everything he knows as the boundaries between real and imagined begin to blur.
Exploring identity in New York, Shanghai, and beyond, Mike Fu’s Masquerade is a skillfully layered, brilliantly interwoven debut novel of friendship, romantic longing, and worlds on the brink, asking how we can find ourselves among ghosts of all kinds, and who we can trust when nothing—and no one—is as it seems.
Available on Kindle. Hard copies not available in China.
JUNE 2026
FORTESS BESEIGED by Qian Zhongshu (1940)
“The greatest Chinese novel of the 20th century”
Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese war, Fortress Besieged recounts the exuberant misadventures of the hapless hero Fang Hung-chien, who after aimlessly studying in Europe at his family’s expense returns to Shanghai armed with a bogus degree from a fake university.
On the liner back, Fang’s life becomes deeply entangled with those of two Chinese beauties – while when he does finally make it home, he obtains a teaching post at a newly established university, encounters effete pseudo-intellectuals, and falls into a marriage of disastrous proportions.
A glorious tale of love, marriage, war, calamity, disillusionment and hope, this is one of the greatest Chinese novels: combining Eastern philosophy, Western traditions, adventure, tragicomedy and satire to create a unique feast of delights.
Available on Kindle. Hard copies available in China.
AUGUST 2026
I LOVE BILL and Other Stories by Wang Anyi (1995)
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—one set between the 1930s and 1980s, and another in the 1950s—and each time, her work has been a popular favorite. This collection of two novellas and three short stories is set at the turn of the millennium, with nuanced portrayals of life during a time of economic and cultural change.
In the title novella, 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.
Available on Kindle.
SEPTEMBER 2026
FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE by Tash Aw (2013)
Tash Aw turns the classic immigrant narrative on its head in Five Star Billionaire: instead of East-West migration, he looks at intra-Asian migration, with Malaysian characters 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 Embankment Building, and this is the locus of much of the action.
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.
Available on Kindle. Hard copies are not available in Shanghai.
OCTOBER 2026
DEATH IN SHANGHAI by MJ Lee (2015)
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.
Available on Kindle.
NOVEMBER 2026
RED MANDARIN DRESS by Qiu Xiaolong (2009)
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.
Shanghainese author Qiu Xiaolong sets his Inspector Chen series of novels in and around his home city, and this one centers around the familiar former French Concession.
Available on Kindle. Not available in hard copy in Shanghai.
Interested?
Email info@historic-shanghai.com for details about our book club sessions – in person or online.