France is all agog about the diaries of Ma Yan, a 13-year-old Chinese peasant girl, discovered by French reporter Pierre Haski in Xinging province, which have already been serialized in a French newspaper and have made several international sales packaged as a book. Paris agent Susanna Lea took it on, has already sold it (on preempts) in the U.K., Holland and Portugal, and has made further sales to Italy and Greece; now it's heading our way. Ma Yan's Diaries describe a life of considerable hardship and ambition, struggling to stay in school, going without food to buy a pen for her studies, and give a touching and candid account of life in remote rural China today. Haski has translated and annotated the diaries, and they're out from the French house Ramsay this week.