First came Wild Swans , then Falling Leaves . Now an equally authentic story of rural China, written by a British student, is expected to surpass both those bestsellers.
Justin Hill's first novel is only half written, but The Drink and Dream Teahouse has already earned him an unprecedented £150,000 book deal with publisher Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
The sum was agreed last month following a fierce battle between five publishing houses and is thought to be the largest one-book offer made to a first-time novelist on sight of just a partial manuscript. The book business is still prepared to bank on the British reader's obsession with all things Oriental.
With Arthur Golden's semi-factual study of Japan, Memoirs of a Geisha , still selling well, hunger for detailed chronicles of lives lived out in far-flung places grows unabated. That trend is expected to catapult Hill from his student digs in Preston, Lancashire, to a place among London's literati. And it could not have come at a better time for the penurious 28-year-old.
'I went to my bank the day before I approached the publishers and they told me I only had £9 left in my account. I was very worried how I was going to make it last through the weekend,' Hill told The Observer .
So he decided to persuade someone to look seriously at the first 150 pages of the novel he was working on. Five publishers were soon interested and an auction between the top three bidders finally closed in a draw. Two made matching £150,000 bids and Hill chose at his leisure.
'As soon as I knew the deal was concluded, I went out to the supermarket and bought myself an £8 organic chicken. To spend that much money on a chicken was a great feeling, even if it did leave only £1 in my bank account.'
He is now considering buying a house in London when his course at Lancaster University has finished.
Hill, who grew up in York, is a former English language teacher who worked with Voluntary Service Overseas and is now studying creative writing. He has lived and worked in China twice, most recently last year, and taught English as a foreign language in Eritrea, from where he had to be airlifted when the war with Ethiopia broke out.
He has already written a commercially unsuccessful travel book about China, A Bend in the Yellow River , which, five years ago, was also published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, unknown to Weidenfeld's fiction editor, Neil Taylor.
'I was not working here then, so I did not pick up on the coincidence,' said Taylor. 'Funnily enough, I think we also rejected his second factual book too, a decision Justin says he now understands.'
Taylor was deeply im-pressed with the opening chapters of Hill's new book, which tell the fictional story of the effect on two families of the closure of an old-fash ioned, revolutionary-style factory in inland China. Hill's completed 300-page saga is due out this time next year.
'The story is immediately involving in the way the best novels are,' said Taylor. 'The characters move and speak, they are real for the reader and they invite a tender complicity in their loves, losses and dreams.'
Taylor said the early pages reminded him of the work of the new wave of Chinese film directors.
French publisher Gallimard has also brought the book. 'Never before in our history have we acquired a novel in translation on the strength of a partial manuscript,' said a spokesperson.
Even the process of writing the book has been surprising for Hill. 'The themes may be the same, but it is not the story I set out to write. There is romance; in fact, there is almost everything. Lots of food too.'
The current feast of Oriental literature began in 1993 with Jung Chang's Wild Swans and was followed up by publication of her friend Adeline Yen Mah's similarly bestselling Falling Leaves in 1998. It has lasted longer than the publishing interest in India that sprang up in the wake of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things .
'There was a huge boom in Indian fiction,' said Taylor, 'but it was never really picked up in the United States. It seemed to be a European thing. There is a feeling in publishing that the Indian novel has had its day. There were just too many of them.
'But there is still an interest in story-telling that is exotic and yet fairly familiar. Memoirs of a Geisha , for instance, was an extraordinary story, with no Westerners in it, yet somehow readers here are able to relate to it.'
