The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell, Knopf

Eh? China? Wallander?
You’re right, m’dear, this is by Henning Mankell, who writes those gloomy Swedish thrillers about depressed detective Kurt Wallander - but this time his lead is a woman and his villain Chinese.
A copper?
Not as such. Judge Birgitta Roslin, loosely associated with an extended family wiped out in a remote hamlet on the border between Norway and Sweden.
How loosely?
Her mammy was fostered by a couple now in the far reaches of antiquity, who are among the 19 members of the Andren clan to be sliced and diced. The police have a theory. Birgitta soon has a different one.
But Beijing? What? Where?
Meanwhile in Beijing’s wealthiest sector, a super-powerful industrialist is reading the diary of his ancestor, who was enslaved. The foreman of the railroad gang that destroyed his life was one Jan August Andren.
Straightforward revenge story then?
Indeed no - this is Mankell. Darker forces are at work. In Africa, the Chinese (nervous of internal revolution, as why wouldn’t they be) are preparing a plantation - they want to ship in millions of poor Chinese farmers.
To Africa? You’re joking?
They’re persuading the African leaders that it’s going to benefit their own people, because schools, hospitals, roads, telecommunications, etc will follow the planters to sparsely populated areas.
Mankell’s making this all up out of his head?
Hope so. Unnervingly, he has inside knowledge of Africa - the author lives part of his time in Mozambique.
It’s linked to the killings how?
The psycho who sent the killer is high up in China’s elite. And - well, read it for yourself.
Good, then?
Very good at times, but Mankell has trouble keeping all the themes - murder, Maoist theory, modern Chinese emigration, 19th-century exploitation - from spinning out of control.
Author's site

Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong

Hamish Hamilton

Wolf Totem is the second biggest seller in China, after Chairman Mao's Little Red Book - a genuine publishing sensation.
This ecological love note is the story of a student in the 1960s who flees to the Mongolian grasslands with a work group made up of the sons of capitalist-roaders and dissident academics.
There he learns that the world is in balance: the wolves hunt the herders' sheep, and the herders the wolves - but the herders also preserve the wolves.
As the boy magically floats across the deep snow on a boat of felt to rescue a gazelle, survivor of a massacre by wolves, he curses the wolves.
His elderly Mongol mentor is furious. If you left the gazelles to eat all the grass, it would be gone and there would be nothing for sheep, gazelle, human or wolf, he says.
Forty years later, the Chinese have moved in on the grasslands and their sheep have grazed it away, and they have shot and poisoned the wolves and eagles, and rats have bred in millions.
As he sits in Beijing, now a professor of economics, a dust storm comes flying in - the dust of the lost plains, their grass eaten away after an ecological balance of thousands of years was destroyed.
Everyone should read this book.

Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan

Saving Fish from Drowning
Amy Tan
(Harper Perennial €??)

Synopsis: Bibi Chen, found gruesomely dead at the start of the story, accompanies her tour group in ghost form. Described in Bibi’s waspish commentary, the group wreak havoc through China and Burma, then disappear without trace.

VERY, very funny, a cutting satire on Americans abroad, edgy and completely impossible to stop reading, even at 3am with your eyelids propped up by matchsticks, Saving Fish from Drowning will be passed from sister to sister until the cover falls off from too much loving.

Accompanied by the furious, opinionated ghost of their tour organiser, a bumbling group of middle-class Americans set off on a journey through China and Burma.

Powerless to make her many opinions felt, ghostly Bibi shouts in their ears as they make one cultural boo-boo after another.

It’s all going to end badly, especially when a man with prostate problems mistakes the sacred shrine of the female genitalia for a useful outdoor urinal, and the whole group is cursed, and their children after them.

Our group includes Moff – the hippie entrepreneur who started by growing a screen of bamboo to shelter his marijuana plants from prying official eyes, and ended up making his fortune from decorative bamboos.

Moff’s son, Rupert, is a perfectly ordinary American kid – until seen with the desirous eyes of a beaten-down Burmese tribe who have been waiting for the risen Christ for generations.

The love interest: Harry, the doggy behavioural scientist whose TV programme, The Fido Files, is a worldwide craze with pet owners, and elegant Marlena Chu, Shanghai-born, Sorbonne-educated, from a millionaire family who lost it all in the flight from China and were now just comfortably off in America.

But this is a bedroom farce, with doors opening and closing and the gods and demons ready to bedevil all hopeful lovers.

And when the 11 go missing, both the vicious Burmese regime and the international media see an advertising opportunity. Could Moff have been a heroin dealer? Who’s the political activist stowed away amid the group? Have they gone into hiding with the Karen underground?

Amy Tan, as always, brings the otherworlds into her story. The Nats, or irritable undead spirits that cause everything from car crashes to diarrhoea, are, as a Burmese journalist attests “a big problem here”, and make themselves known by leading everyone into trouble.

It’s always good to see a new Amy Tan, and this is one of her best. Absolutely hilarious.