The Daily Beast

This Week’s Hot Reads, January 2, 2012

Jan 3, 2012 7:22 PM EST

This week: a satiric novel about the Chinese state, Pico Iyer’s adventures with Graham Greene, the nasty history of Frano-Anglo meddling in the Middle East, thrilling Victorian detective fiction, and a publishing giant’s memoirs.

The Fat Years
By Chan Koonchung

The Fat Years By Chan Koonchung 336 pages. Nan A. Talese. $26.95.

Chan Koonchung's satirical portrait of a world-dominant China, The Fat Years, tells the story of a writer gradually made to question the foundations of a thriving society too content and repressed to examine them. Almost everyone in Koonchung's China is happy, manically happy, including Chen, the protagonist. But when he runs into two old friends, he gets clued into something strange: a month has gone missing from the collective memory. With its obvious allegory for the state's censorship of events like those of 1989, The Fat Years is banned in China. Yet just as some characters in the novel thrive amidst the booming economy and controlling state, the novel became popular online and Chan himself now lives in Beijing.

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