Want to know what books Paul French recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Paul French's favorite book recommendations of all time.
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The gap that divides those of us born in the 1970s and the older generation has never been so wide.
Dark and edgy, deliciously naughty, an intoxicating cocktail of sex and the search for love, Shanghai Baby has already risen to cult status in mainland China. The risque contents of the breakthrough novel by hip new author Wei Hui have so alarmed Beijing authorities that thousands of copies have been confiscated and burned. As explicit as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, as shocking as Trainspotting, this story of a beautiful writer and her erotically charged affairs... more The gap that divides those of us born in the 1970s and the older generation has never been so wide.
Dark and edgy, deliciously naughty, an intoxicating cocktail of sex and the search for love, Shanghai Baby has already risen to cult status in mainland China. The risque contents of the breakthrough novel by hip new author Wei Hui have so alarmed Beijing authorities that thousands of copies have been confiscated and burned. As explicit as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, as shocking as Trainspotting, this story of a beautiful writer and her erotically charged affairs jumps, howls, and hits the ground running as it depicts the new generation rising in the East.
Set in the centuries-old port city of Shanghai, the novel follows the days, and nights, of the irrepressibly carnal Coco, who waits tables in a café when she meets her first lover, a sensitive Chinese artist. Defying her parents, Coco moves in with her boyfriend and enters a frenzied, orgasmic world of drugs and hedonism. But, helpless to stop her gentle lover's descent into addiction, Coco becomes attracted to a boisterous Westerner, a rich German businessman with a penchant for S/M and seduction. Now, with an entourage of friends ranging from a streetwise madame to a rebellious filmmaker, Coco's forays into in the territory of love and lust cross the borders between two cultures -- awakening her guilt and fears of discovery, yet stimulating her emerging sexual self. Searing a blistering image into the reader's imagination, Shanghai Baby provides an alternative travelogue into the back streets of a city and the hard-core escapades of today's liberated youth. Wei Hui's provocative portrayal of men, women, and cultural transition is an astonishing and brave exposure of the unacknowledged new China, breaking through official rhetoric to show the inroads of the West and a people determined to burst free. less 
Paul FrenchThe book was published in 1999, but Wei Hui was really writing about the mid-1990s, which was the absolute apex of Shanghai in its second embodiment as a wide-open city, under Jiang Zemin’s administration of China. (Source)
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Paul FrenchMaurice Dekobra was a French author, writing in the 1930s mostly. He is a very literary and fascinating writer in a populist way, and Honeymoon in Shanghai is one of his most interesting stories. He writes about a foreign woman with her young attractive daughter, stuck in Shanghai. She’s almost pimping her daughter out, trying to find her a boyfriend or suitors—not necessarily husbands, but... (Source)
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The Story
Eileen Chang, Julia Lovell, Ang Lee | 3.80
Now a major motion picture from Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain): an intensely passionate story of love and espionage, set in Shanghai during World War II.
In the midst of the Japanese occupation of China and Hong Kong, two lives become intertwined: Wong Chia Chi, a young student active in the resistance, and Mr. Yee, a powerful political figure who works for the Japanese occupational government. As these two move deftly between Shanghai’s tea parties and secret interrogations, they become embroiled in the complicated... more Now a major motion picture from Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain): an intensely passionate story of love and espionage, set in Shanghai during World War II.
In the midst of the Japanese occupation of China and Hong Kong, two lives become intertwined: Wong Chia Chi, a young student active in the resistance, and Mr. Yee, a powerful political figure who works for the Japanese occupational government. As these two move deftly between Shanghai’s tea parties and secret interrogations, they become embroiled in the complicated politics of wartime — and in a mutual attraction that may be more than what they expected. Written in lush, lavish prose, and with the tension of a political thriller, Lust, Caution brings 1940s Shanghai artfully to life even as it limns the erotic pulse of a doomed love affair. less Paul FrenchIt’s impossible to spend any time in Shanghai without picking up an Eileen Chang book. This is a great novel about Shanghai, and also Hong Kong, at that period when people were forced to make choices. I would suggest Lust Caution as a good way of getting into Eileen Chang because it is a novella, about the shortest thing that she ever wrote, and it’s very Shanghai. (Source)
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Andre Malraux, Haakon M. Chevalier | 3.83
Paul FrenchMan’s Fate is about the suppression of the labour movement and the nascent Communist Party of China on April 12th, 1927, a massacre which at that time was on the front-page of every newspaper in the world. It’s an incredible novel, and has one of the best opening scenes of any novel I can think of. (Source)
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