THE DRINK AND DREAM TEAHOUSE

Hill's experiences teaching English in Hunan Province gave rise to this novel (much anticipated in Britain) tracing the lives of several families in the small town of Shaoyang. In Hill's China, the past is ever close behind, and modernity mingles uneasily with ancient custom: waitresses in traditional dress serve traditional food in a karaoke bar with a wide-screen TV, and a video store sits next to a rice stall. Three generations of Shaoyang residents are tugged at by the disparate ideologies of their times, from the nationalism of Chiang Kai-shek and the communism of Mao Zedong to the idealism of Tiananmen Square and the open market economics of Deng Xiaoping. Da Shan, the prodigal son who returns as a successful businessman, rejects both his parents' Communist beliefs and his own revolutionary past; Liu Bei, the girlfriend he deserted, has turned from protesting to prostitution to support her young son; petulant young Peach, whose flirtation with a local boy snowballs out of her control, sings American pop songs as an antidote to her mother's operatic tastes. Parental meddling in the lives of the younger generation provides a measure of wry humor, but the general outlook is grim: political and familial betrayals are ubiquitous. If Hill's characters lean toward archetypes, they are unusual and well-detailed ones, and the slightly distanced stance of the narrative seems appropriate for an Englishman writing about China. His voice is tender and wise beyond his years. While the ending is uncharacteristically neat, the novel as a whole is governed by a more complex sense of the future: "If they were both in a story, then there would be a happy ending... but only in stories." Rights sold in France, Germany, Holland and Italy. (Oct. 25)