Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel

by Dai Sijie, Sijie Dai

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is an enchanting tale that captures the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening. An immediate international bestseller, it tells the story of two hapless city boys exiled to a remote mountain village for re-education during China’s infamous Cultural Revolution. There the two friends meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western... (more)

Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch

by Sijie Dai

Having enchanted readers on two continents with Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie now produces a rapturous and uproarious collision of East and West, a novel about the dream of love and the love of dreams. Fresh from 11 years in Paris studying Freud, bookish Mr. Muo returns to China to spread the gospel of psychoanalysis. His secret purpose is to free his college sweetheart from prison. To do... (more)

Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

From the author of the beloved best seller Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress , a haunting tale of love and of the beguiling power of a lost language. When Puyi, the last emperor, was exiled to Manchuria in the early 1930s, it is said that he carried an eight-hundred-year-old silk scroll inscribed with a lost sutra composed by the Buddha. Eventually the scroll would be sold illicitly to an eccentric French... (more)