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.
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.
