French Concession: A Novel

by Xiao Bai

Overview

An acclaimed Chinese writer makes his English language debut with this heart-stopping literary noir, a richly atmospheric tale of espionage and international intrigue, set in Shanghai in 1931—an electrifying, decadent world of love, violence, and betrayal filled with femme fatales, criminals, revolutionaries, and spies.

A boat from Hong Kong arrives in Shanghai harbor, carrying an important official in the Nationalist Party and his striking wife, Leng. Amid the raucous sound of firecrackers, gunshots ring out; an assassin has shot the official and then himself. Leng disappears in the ensuing chaos.

Hseuh, a Franco-Chinese photographer aboard the same boat, became captivated by Leng’s beauty and unconcealed misery. Now, she is missing. But Hsueh is plagued by a mystery closer to home: he suspects his White Russian lover, Therese, is unfaithful. Why else would she disappear so often on their recent vacation? When he’s arrested for mysterious reasons in the French Concession and forced to become a police collaborator, he realizes that in the seamy, devious world of Shanghai, no one is who they appear to be.

Coerced into spying for the authorities, Hseuh discovers that Therese is secretly an arms dealer, supplying Shanghai’s gangs with weapons. His investigation of Therese eventually leads him back to Leng, a loyal revolutionary with ties to a menacing new gang, led by a charismatic Communist whose acts of violence and terrorism threaten the entire country.

His aptitude for espionage draws Hseuh into a dark underworld of mobsters, smugglers, anarchists, and assassins. Torn between Therese and Leng, he vows to protect them both. As the web of intrigue tightens around him, Hsueh plays a dangerous game, hoping to stay alive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062313560
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	07/07/2015
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Xiao Bai was born in 1968 in Shanghai. He is the author of Horny Hamlet, a prize-winning collection of essays, and the novel Game Point. In 2013 his novella, Xu Xiangbi the Spy, won the tenth annual Shanghai Literary Prize. French Concession is his first novel to be translated into English. He lives in Shanghai.

Editorial Reviews

05/04/2015
Even with the helpful list of dramatis personae, this novel of 1930s Shanghai from Xiao (Game Point) remains a hot mess of murky political intrigue, steamy couplings, foreign profiteering, and often-naive Communist fervor. It’s hard to keep the players and their shifting allegiances straight when the characters themselves—most of whom go by multiple names, to make matters even more confusing—frequently find themselves in the same bind. Can central figure Hseuh, a half-Chinese, half-French photographer, become a useful undercover operative for the French police controlling the Concession, or will he remain a dilettante boy toy to the sexually insatiable White Russian arms dealer (who might really be German) alternately known as Therese Irxmayer and Lady Holly? Is Leng, the mysterious beauty who bewitches Hseuh, a Communist true believer or a muddled borderline supporter? By the time surprising plot fireworks finally begin to explode, the average reader will probably have long since conceded defeat. (July)

Publishers Weekly

[An] absorbing novel of character and mood…Readers of Alan Furst’s noir novels of Europe on the edge of World War II will find much to enjoy in this superior novel.” — Library Journal

“Xiao Bai has done something totally different. He didn’t write about the 1930’s and the concessions as background for his story-they are the subjects of his writing. He is writing in the tradition of Honoré de Balzac.” — Feng Tao, book editor and critic in Shanghai

“Rich with historical detail, Xiao Bai’s French Concession is a sensual, intellectual thriller—which like human memory, is pulled from the chaos of truth and lies, desire and regret.” — Simon Van Booy

“A complex and fast-paced plot that twists around the murder, in the spring of 1931, of a Nanking politico on his arrival in Shanghai…A political and police novel, historical fresco, and mirror of human passions.” — Il Manifesto (Italy)

From the Publisher

A complex and fast-paced plot that twists around the murder, in the spring of 1931, of a Nanking politico on his arrival in Shanghai…A political and police novel, historical fresco, and mirror of human passions.

Il Manifesto (Italy)

Xiao Bai has done something totally different. He didn’t write about the 1930’s and the concessions as background for his story-they are the subjects of his writing. He is writing in the tradition of Honoré de Balzac.

Feng Tao

Rich with historical detail, Xiao Bai’s French Concession is a sensual, intellectual thriller—which like human memory, is pulled from the chaos of truth and lies, desire and regret.

Simon Van Booy

06/15/2015
Set in 1931, this absorbing novel of character and mood stars Hseiu, a half-Chinese/half-French man, who is isolated by his heritage from both the European and the Chinese communities of his native Shanghai. His occupation as a photographer accentuates his outsider's status—he is more a disinterested eye than a committed actor. He has a mistress, a Russian Jewish gunrunner. Now Hseiu has taken a second lover, Leng, a communist revolutionary. The police force him to spy on both women, and he spins lie upon lie in his struggle to stay afloat but knows that one wrong step will bring disaster to him and those he loves. VERDICT Readers of Alan Furst's noir novels of Europe on the edge of World War II will find much to enjoy in this superior novel. [See Kristi Chadwick's mystery feature, "Not Your Usual Suspects," LJ 4/15/15.—Ed.]—DK

Library Journal

2015-04-15
Shanghai between the world wars provides the backdrop for a photographer embroiled in an underworld of gangsters, gunrunners, Communist insurgents, and two bewitching women. The first novel by Bai translated into English centers on Hsueh, a photojournalist of French-Chinese extraction who's arriving in Shanghai with his lover, Therese, an arms dealer. An army officer on the boat is assassinated after it docks, and his wife, Leng, mysteriously disappears. Much of the story takes place in the French-administered pocket of the city, which is more lawless than those run by the British, Americans, or Chinese, but the local police still want to get to the bottom of the killing, and Hsueh is soon roped in to report on Therese's dealings and Leng's connection to a Communist cell. "Hsueh never let himself think too hard about ethics, consequences, the meaning of life, things like that," Bai writes of the novel's hero—a line that, like many in this story, strives for noirish flintiness but largely feels inert, plodding, and overly convoluted. Over the course of the two months depicted in the novel, Hsueh connects romantically with both Therese and Leng while uncovering plots to smuggle machine guns and rob banks, but all this talk of sex and violence lacks much energy, and what's meant to be comic banter between Hsueh and the French officers often curdles. Some of the novel's flaws may be matters of translation—sentences are larded with clichés, non sequiturs ("the sky was dream bright"), or just plain stiff phrasing ("he felt as though he had been caught between the cogwheels of two sophisticated killing machines"). But Bai has written a story so tangled that its concluding explosions inevitably have all the force of a pop gun. A strained historical crime yarn whose central gumshoe is much too flat-footed.

Kirkus Reviews