My Shanghai Neighbours

Gripping tales of electively muted trauma. The potted histories of aging residents in a middle-class Shanghai compound supply different perspectives on protest and the Party, with its ambiguous sexual encounters, and individual ways of reconciling the past and its perpetrators/ perpetration. All along, their narratives are guided by the transcendent observations of Jing Zhang, a self-interested cat castrato whose classical music and intellectual preferences should not be ignored. Evidently drawing on real-life observations in a kind of creative writer's ethnography, these broken tales of ill-fated Shanghai dreams make compelling reading. 

-- Professor Vivienne Lo, University College London

In this heartfelt paean to Shanghai, Marcus Fedder weaves an intricate portrait of the workings of a Xincun (compound) in the former French Concession, with a cast of characters that will in equal part surpise, charm and amuse.