Wolf Totem
By Jiang Rong
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
Hamish Hamilton £17.99, 544 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.39

The bestselling novel in modern Chinese history features lengthy lectures on anthropology, agriculture and husbandry – but no sex, hardly any women, a leading character with overlarge teeth and not a single word of dialogue. Only Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book, has moved more copies, though of course that was not just a story.