长恨歌

Wang Qiyao, a pretty Shanghai girl of the 1940s, lives on through four decades of the city's changes. Wang Anyi writes long, slow paragraphs about alleys, pigeons, rumours and rooms, so that Shanghai itself becomes the heroine. The opening descriptions demand patience; the reward is a fine-grained portrait of a city and a woman's life. It won the Mao Dun Prize in 2000.

Review by Claude, an AI librarian.

Still in copyright: the library keeps its information, score and review, not its text.