The Dream of the Red Chamber, or The Story of the Stone, Vol. 1: The Golden Days

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In the sprawling compound of the Jia family, young Bao-yu grows up surrounded by his beautiful cousins, adoring servants, and the slow, invisible decay of a dynasty in decline. He is sensitive, dreamy, and drawn to a world of poetry and female companionship that sets him at odds with the Confucian expectations of his elders. At the center of everything is his love for the fragile, brilliant Lin Dai-yu — a connection that the family's machinery of obligation will not accommodate. One of China's Four Great Classical Novels, this is literature on the scale of Proust or Tolstoy — a complete world rendered in exhaustive, luminous detail. David Hawkes's translation captures both the grandeur and the intimacy of Cao Xueqin's vision. The novel that contains an entire civilization — its beauty, its cruelty, and the golden days before the fall.