Our summer '23 reading list

We have this extended holiday break ahead of us. That means lots of time to reconnect with your loved ones here in China or abroad. Wherever you are this summer season this, we hope you will take some time to enjoy a good book. As ever, our Wellington Shanghai Library team has compiled a list of recommendations below. Enjoy your long break!   

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

By Mary Roach

What is to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science — the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

By Gabrielle Zevin

This is the story of Sam and Sadie. It is not a romance, but it is about love. When Sam catches sight of Sadie at a crowded train station one winter morning he is catapulted back to the brief time they spent playing together as children. Their unique spark is instantly reignited. What comes next is a story of friendship and rivalry, fame and creativity, betrayal and tragedy, perfect worlds and imperfect ones. And, ultimately, our need to connect — to be loved and to love.

The Last Rose of Shanghai

By Weina Dai Randel

The year is 1940. Aiyi Shao is a young heiress and the owner of a formerly popular and glamorous Shanghai nightclub. Ernest Reismann is a penniless Jewish refugee driven out of Germany, an outsider searching for shelter in a city wary of strangers. He loses nearly all hope until he crosses paths with Aiyi. When she hires Ernest to play piano at her club, her defiance of custom causes a sensation. His instant fame makes Aiyi’s club once again the hottest spot in Shanghai. Soon they realize they share more than a passion for jazz ― but their differences seem insurmountable, and Aiyi is engaged to another man.

The Book Eaters

By Sunyi Dean

Hidden across England and Scotland live six old Book Eater families. The last of their lines, they exist on the fringes of society and subsist on a diet of stories and legends. Children are rare and their numbers have dwindled, so when Devon Fairweather’s second child is born a dreaded Mind Eater, a perversion of her own kind who consumes not stories but the minds and souls of humans, she flees before he can be turned into a weapon for the family… or worse.

How High We Go in the Dark

By Sequoia Nagamatsu

Dr Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter's research only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. Yet even while struggling to counter this destructive force, humanity stubbornly persists in myriad moving and ever inventive ways.

Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects, a pig, develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from a coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.