Best Chinese Books of 2024

Best Chinese Books of 2024 brings together a list of some of the best books from China published during 2024. 

Tons of great Chinese books were released this year. The China Minutes team made some of our own choices and reached out to people in the book industry to hear their thoughts. For this list, we have focused on the best Chinese fiction books of 2024, leaving non-fiction for another day. All the books are published in English, having been translated from Chinese for the first time in 2024.

The Lantern and the Night Moths by Yilin Wang
Tianxin Tian – Manager at London’s Guanghwa Bookshop.

The Lantern and the Night Moths (灯与夜蛾) embarks on a poetic journey through the works of 秋瑾 (Qiu Jin), 张巧慧 (Zhang Qiaohui), 废名 (Fei Ming), 小西 (Xiao Xi), and 戴望舒 (Dai Wangshu). In this anthology, Yilin Wang presents a rich selection of Chinese poetry by unique and notable modern and contemporary poets, accompanied by her essays that delve into the art and craft of translation.

Poetry serves as a lifeline for Yilin, an immigrant navigating the Diaspora. Through her translations, the lives of these poets come vividly to life, revealing their visions, deepest thoughts, and concerns. Poetry is far more than just words on paper. Through Yilin’s work, we uncover the true essence of these poets and find ourselves immersed in a profound sense of homesickness, not simply a longing for a specific place or physical country, but an emotional and spiritual yearning for belonging, identity, and connection.

This book is currently available at Guanghwa Bookshop in London Chinatown if you want to find a copy. 

The Unfilial: Four Tragic Tales from Modern China by Yao Emei (Trans: Will Spence, Olivia Milburn, Honey Watson and Martin Ward)
Daniel Li – Sinoist

A collection of four short stories on the brutal realities of family life in modern China. When a household crumbles, it’s always the women who are left picking up the pieces, but no one comes out looking good when caught in a vicious cycle of abuse. Come inside at your peril: after all, what’s a closet without its skeletons?

Yao Emei shines a brutally honest light on the crumbling foundations of the Chinese family unit with scalpel-sharp precision. In these four short stories, published together as The Unfilial: Four Tragic Tales from Modern China (家庭生活) she sensitively depicts the struggle to escape a vicious cycle of abuse where no one comes out looking good.

This book is currently available from Sinoist if you are interested in reading it. 

Fate Rewritten by Dong Xi (Trans: John Balcom)

Fate Rewritten was originally published in Chinese as 篡改的命 during 2015. This year it got published in English for the first time by Sinoist. It tells the story of how far someone would go to change their fate.

Protagonist Wang Changchi isn’t the sort of person who can dream big. For generations, his family have dreamed of escaping their poverty-stricken village the only direction he can go is through the back door, along with the hordes of illegal construction workers risking their lives just to scrape together a living.

Author Dong Xi wanted to tell the story faced by many in China, taking inspiration from where he grew up in Guangxi province of China. He chose to set his work in a non-descript town that could be a stand-in for any city across the south of China.

This book is currently available from Sinoist if you are interested in reading it. 

Granta 169: China edited by Thomas Meaney

This year Granta, a quarterly British literary magazine, published a special edition solely dedicated to writing from China. It is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese literature or China more broadly.

Highlights from this collection include a memoir from Xiao Hai on moving to Shenzhen at fifteen to work in its factories and reportage from Han Zhang who visited working-class writers carving out a living in the outskirts of Beijing. There is also fiction, poetry, and photography from an array of great Chinese writers.

Particularly special is how Granta goes out of its way to draw attention to other parts of China, moving away from a Shanghai-Beijing centric land that many will know.

Granta 169: China can be bought from the magazine’s website. 

Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror translated by Xueting C. Ni

This anthology brings together a selection of fascinating Chinese horror stories translated into English for the very first time. It is a worthy addition to translated Chinese literature especially as it covers horror which receives little focus when it comes to translated work despite China’s strong horror repertoire in literature and on screen. The Waking Dream by Fan Zhou in particular left me thinking, not only being genuinely scary but also addressing the struggles of working culture through horror fiction.

Sinophagia is a strong follow-up to Sinopticon by Xueting C. Ni, which collected a series of short Chinese science-fiction stories.

Sinophagia is published by Solaris and can be purchased from their website.