Chenxi and the Foreigner

Helen has just finished her Year 12 and is visiting her father in Shanghai. As she doesn’t speak Chinese, her father arranges for a young student called Chenxi to look after her. Helen falls in love with Chenxi at first sight, but he proves to be an enigma. Helen soon realises that the only thing they have in common is their passion for art. Then Laurent, a drug-dealing French student, is drawn into the relationship between Helen and Chenxi. He won’t admit it, but he has fallen for Helen, as strongly as she for Chenxi. “Chenxi and the Foreigner” is a novel about art, politics and falling in love with a ‘foreigner’. It is also a novel about choice and taking charge of one’s own destiny, which is, Helen discovers, the final transition from adolescence to adulthood.