The Drink and Dream Teahouse

Justin Hill

Justin Hill's debut novel is set in Shaoyang in Hunan province in China, a city given by Hill the feel of a Chinese Swindon. Grown too large to have retained any soul and yet too small to escape its air of dreary provincialism. There is a sense that the important things, politically, are happening far from here. Indeed, the book opens, more or less, with the arrival of a big shot prodigal son who has made his fortune in Guangzhou.

It's a book peopled, for the most part, with the elderly, with single mums and with prostitutes (the Drink and Dream Teahouse is, of course, a brothel) with the unlucky and the unwise, characters who you feel aren't coping too well in the the new China and who are missing the old certainties. There's also an awful lot of eating going on.

I can't say it's a spectacularly good read. It's one of those books which starts off with a bang - the first chapter is very fine - and ends with a whimper. Actually, the whimper begins nearer the middle than the end. Not really recommended.