Hung Lou Meng

The decline of a great house in eighteenth-century Peking, told through a boy born with a jade in his mouth, the cousin he loves and the cousin he marries, and four hundred servants who see everything. Cao Xueqin wrote it in poverty from the memory of his own ruined family; Joly's is the first substantial English translation, made in the 1890s and left unfinished at his death. The Chinese consider it the greatest of their novels, and the domestic detail is the reason. Fifty-eight plates by painters including Canaletto and Whistler carry the parks, gardens, music rooms and river views of eighteenth-century London, the same city that shaped the novel's world.