The gap that divides those of us born in the 1970s and the older generation has never been so wide.

Dark and edgy, deliciously naughty, an intoxicating cocktail of sex and the search for love, Shanghai Baby has already risen to cult status in mainland China. The risque contents of the breakthrough novel by hip new author Wei Hui have so alarmed Beijing authorities that thousands of copies have been confiscated and burned. As explicit as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, as shocking as Trainspotting, this story of a beautiful writer and her erotically charged affairs jumps, howls, and hits the ground running as it depicts the new generation rising in the East.

Set in the centuries-old port city of Shanghai, the novel follows the days, and nights, of the irrepressibly carnal Coco, who waits tables in a café when she meets her first lover, a sensitive Chinese artist. Defying her parents, Coco moves in with her boyfriend and enters a frenzied, orgasmic world of drugs and hedonism. But, helpless to stop her gentle lover's descent into addiction, Coco becomes attracted to a boisterous Westerner, a rich German businessman with a penchant for S/M and seduction. Now, with an entourage of friends ranging from a streetwise madame to a rebellious filmmaker, Coco's forays into in the territory of love and lust cross the borders between two cultures -- awakening her guilt and fears of discovery, yet stimulating her emerging sexual self.

Searing a blistering image into the reader's imagination, Shanghai Baby provides an alternative travelogue into the back streets of a city and the hard-core escapades of today's liberated youth. Wei Hui's provocative portrayal of men, women, and cultural transition is an astonishing and brave exposure of the unacknowledged new China, breaking through official rhetoric to show the inroads of the West and a people determined to burst free.

卫慧,被称为 "晚生代"、“新新人类” 女作家, 1973年生，摩羯座。1995年毕业于复旦大学中文系,做过记者,编辑,电台主持,咖啡点女侍, 蹩脚的鼓手, 不成功的广告文案, 自编自导自演过话剧, 参加99国际"超市艺术展" . 现居上海写作.出版作品包括《蝴蝶的尖叫》，《水中的处女》，《像卫慧那样的疯狂》，《欲望手枪》。 部分作品译介入美国,德国,日本。