Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie

Vladamir Nabokov once noted that "life not unfrequently imitates the French novelists." Dai Sijie applies this dictum to the unlikeliest of settings: 1970s China. His first novel tells the tale of two Chinese teens who discover the forbidden pleasures of reading (and retelling) French novels deep in the Chinese countryside during Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Dai's novel received a warm reception in France last year, earning awards and widespread praise. Yet the book's value lies not in its homage to Balzac or the triumph of "Frenchness" in a foreign setting; rather, it demonstrates the power that individual readers wield when they take stories to heart and pass them on, even (or especially) when this is done covertly.

Dai renders into fiction the story of his "reeducation"--a Cultural Revolution code word for the process by which high school graduates were conscripted to labor in the Chinese countryside among peasants. The novel's narrator and his friend Luo are the sons of medical professionals who have been branded enemies of the state; ironically, the boys have had hardly any more schooling than the peasants with whom they must work.