The title story in this collection of tales of a bygone Shanghai was adapted for cinema by director Ang Lee, and at under 30 pages is amazingly brief given the film’s close to three-hour run time. Packed with flashback, intrigue and subtle detail, it’s so condensed it improves on a second read. Other pieces are more simply constructed but equally evocative of Shanghai in the 1930s and 40s, where Chang grew up and began to publish. Along with her insightful non-judgmental way of presenting her characters and their dilemmas, the stories share an admirable clarity, precision and attention to detail, as if she sensed she was writing as much for posterity as for contemporary readers.
–LA (Penguin, £7.99. Amazon £5.99)

More on 1930s and 40s Shanghai from JG Ballard, the writer most nominated for plaudits on our Top 10 (Paul Morley proposed knighthood: ‘Arise, Sir Crash’). Given the significance of his work, Ballard has notched up surprisingly few major literary awards, as though the literary luvvies faced resolutely the other way on genre grounds. His only Booker shortlisted novel is an atypical one, 1984’s Empire of the Sun, based on his wartime childhood in Shanghai. The first half of this memoir again dips into that fascinating material, while later chapters whiz through Ballard’s personal and writing life in Britain up to the present day, complete with vignettes from working life such as a pitch meeting for Hammer Film’s adaptation of Drowned World. Hilarious. Disjointed. Surreal. Ballardian.
–LA (Fourth Estate £14.99)

This debut from Vanessa Gebbie is peopled by characters that you can believe in and be affected by. Batty Annie fishes for her son’s soul in a tunnel. Eva Duffy hears the Virgin Mary speak to her from inside the glass bubble of the title. Dodie waits for someone to notice her. These are ordinary people examined with an unflinching eye, and their tales are of hurt, loss, addiction, and damage. Gebbie has won many prizes for her short stories as they began to appear online over the past few years. She has only recently broken into paper, and presumably more will follow. Here she skilfully employs a light touch, and compassion, to illuminate with care. A beautifully crafted collection of depth and heart. –SC (Salt Publishing, £12.99)

Set in the summer of 2007, Born Yesterday is a book that weaves a narrative of sorts from images not long vanished from the British news. The twin disappearances that summer of Blair and Madeleine, Gordon Brown’s induction as PM against the backdrop of the floods, along with a slightly less public image of Thatcher being walked in the park by her minders. Not what you’d generally think of as a novel, then, but Burn’s meditations on absence and celebrity, on leadership and loss, make oddly compulsive reading. –LA (Faber, £7.99)

Reviews this issue by Lane Ashfeldt and Sara Crowley.