My Works

When Lan comes home to Shanghai after ten years in Europe she finds the city enigmatic: people she knew from childhood seem odd—her own identity is a mystery. 

An adopted orphan, she tries to locate her biological parents, but everyone who could help is evasive. Her only clue is cricket fighting—a millennium-old Chinese pastime turned gambling racket where nouveaux riches meet the underworld by night. The deeper she digs into her own mystery, the more obscure and sinister it becomes. The truth takes her by surprise after illicit sex on New Year’s Eve: the past is unspeakably worse than she thought—and not even past. 

With cricket-fight gambling as the leitmotiv, Shanghai Blue weaves past and present, East and West, belonging and estrangement, truth and deceit, fatality and choice into a tight plot with sidelights on China today and its Communist burden.

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In Yue Tao’s mordant, witty, suspenseful novel, I see the struggle for existence, hear desperate cries, and feel the anguish of painful memories—human resilience is a gift to posterity.    
- Xinran, author of The Good Women of China and China Witness among other books, columnist for The Guardian, and adviser to the BBC and Sky on China and the West

Spectacularly successful debut novel, a page-turner, clear and forceful, intricate and gripping, sensitive and utterly convincing, dry, delicious humor. Lively, intimate portrait of life in a Chinese metropolis that upsets Western stereotypes and questions Chinese assumptions. A page-turner with deeply-informed commentary on issues and events in Chinese history.    
- Gregor Benton, Professor of Chinese Studies, Cardiff University, UK; author of numerous books on Chinese history 

Yue Tao weaves a fascinating tapestry whose threads are modern metropolitan China and the dark unconquered past of the Cultural Revolution everyone wants to forget while it keeps creeping back.     
- Peter Potman, past Consul-General for the Netherlands in Shanghai

With her Europeanized sense of humor, Yue Tao describes the China that flows through her veins with amazing effect. Bravo!    
- Lulu Wang, author of The Lily Theater and other novels

Like Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Yue Tao’s novel is fast-moving, well written, and easy to read—with an unthinkable ending. Both pose the question: How to cope with people among us guilty of crimes and sins committed in a previous generation?    
- Danys, literary critic and Yufeng Book Club manager