UFO in Her Eyes
By Xiaolu Gu
Chatto & Windus, £12.99, 200 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

Xiaolu Guo published six novels in Chinese before she wrote her first book in English. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers made a virtue of her then imperfect command of the language. She has clearly been working hard since then. UFO in Her Eyes, Guo’s second English novel, is an entertaining read with a distinctive voice – and her most ambitious work yet.

Set in Silver Hill village – population 500, a “dusty, fly-ridden dump”– the book traces the events of September 11, 2012. On that day, local peasant Kwok Yun is cycling home across the rice fields on her Flying Pigeon bicycle when she sees a “large silver plate” in the sky.

The UFO sighting attracts national attention, and the novel unfolds as a series of testimonies in the ensuing security investigation.

The events make the village question its importance. “Silver Hill is running far behind!” says chief Chang. “It is time for us to do something!” Trees that have survived centuries of “wars, revolutions, droughts” are destroyed to make way for highways, a mobile phone factory, a “future technology hub”.

A giant monument to the UFO is also constructed, a shining emblem of the materialistic future Guo clearly believes her countryfolk have come to worship. For this, of course, is not really a novel about an alien visitation. Everything here is an allegory for modern China. Even the titles of the investigating officers mark key events – “Beijing Agent 1919” refers to the May 4 nationalist movement; his colleague “Hunan Agent 1989” alludes to the Tiananmen massacre.

Like the female protagonists of Guo’s last two novels, Silver Hill village is suddenly growing up fast. And the message is the same: accelerated change brings dislocation.

The flaw, however, is that Guo doesn’t trust her reader to get the point. She shouts her message: that we are rushing into the future, unheeding of all that is lost. And by pressing her moral, she diminishes her story. Like the giant statue of the UFO, this novel is just a little more brash than it needs to be.

Rosie Blau is the FT’s books editor