And here is some kind of review of it, which from what I can make out with Google Translate looks pretty good.

Another review (viewed through Google translate!) is here – very favourable too!

Outside Pearl Buck's house in Zhenjiang

Funnily enough, I visited Pearl Buck’s house in the old vinegar town of Zhenjiang a year or two ago, without really knowing anything about her – the house is now a museum. It’s a colonial-style building on the top of a hill, and surrounded by modern apartment blocks. It was officially closed to the public on the day my friend Gwen and I tried to visit, because it was being used as the location for a Republican-era film. Fortunately the film crew let us have a snoop around, but it was a surreal experience because we kept stumbling across actors in Republican-era costumes (and almost literally stumbling across the power cables trailing all over the floors).

I wasn’t able to work out from Hilary Spurling’s book WHEN exactly Pearl Buck lived there – was it her marital home, or her childhood home with her parents? And is it normally filled with family photographs and objects that relate to her life? (It appeared to have been cleared and rearranged for the film.) If anyone has any information, please leave a comment here!

I was one of the food-writers invited by the Guardian to choose ‘The Best Food Books of the Decade’… and when they published the list today I discovered that the other panellists had put my first book, Sichuan Cookery (published in the US as Land of Plenty) in the Top Ten! What an honour.

And a mention of the paperback of ‘Shark’s Fin’ in the latest New York Times Book Review.

If they did read the book, of course, they’d discover that there’s a whole chapter about the damage caused by the consumption of bits of endangered species, including shark’s fin.

It’s very weird – the very mention of shark’s fin seems to be a kind of trigger for outrage. This has happened to me before online, and I do wonder if some people do a kind of websearch for the term ‘shark’s fin’, and then automatically post furious messages, without troubling themselves to find out what is actually being said.

Hmm.