The City Is a Rising Tide by Rebecca Lee

The City Is a Riding Tide, a novel by Rebecca Lee (Simon & Schuster): Fixed on a pair of Manhattan nonprofit workers who want to build an ill-fated healing center on a perilous bank of the Yangtze River, this is an urgent story infused with lyricism and populated by flawed people who both use one another and also sometimes try to do some good. Every sentence is unpredictable, challenging, and surprising, which can also be said of the turns in the plot, played out in the past and the present, in China, Canada, and New York, and alternately comic and tragic. Even a minor character stands accused of having "his own PR reasons, and actually, more insidiously than that, his own internal PR, the things he broadcast about himself to himself." —Fred Leebron