Letter from Beijing/Clifford Coonan: Chinese Farmers: A Survey is a strange kind of bestseller. As its title suggests, the book is low on ripped bodices and cliff-hanging suspense, but the survey is comprehensive in revealing the suffering of nearly one billion rural poor in the world's most populous country, most of whom live on less than one euro a day.
The survey has sold over a quarter of a million copies in China, despite a standoff-ish official stance, and reflects a growing interest in the plight of those excluded from China's much-trumpeted economic miracle. Doing for contemporary China what George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier or Down and Out in Paris and London did for the Europe of the 1930s, Chinese Farmers: A Survey shows the grim downside of burgeoning growth and reveals the exploitation that has accompanied, and often underpinned, the economic upturn.
The book pulls no punches in its descriptions of the lives of the rural poor, tells of farmers being beaten to death for complaining about fraud and giving details of provincial cadres working to fool the central government about production figures. It lambasts the agricultural tax system, where farmers often pay three times as much in tax as a city dweller, on a fraction of the income, which leaves the rural poor subsidising the rich urban minority.
And Chinese Farmers: A Survey goes some way to explaining why the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, and many rich coastal cities, are filled with migrant workers from the countryside. Or why farmers would rather emigrate illegally and risk death gathering cockles in Morecambe Bay than stay in the rural dust bowls of home.
While poor farmers make up around 800 million of China's 1.3 billion people, the fact that they have been so steadily denied a stake in the new wealth enjoyed by city folk has sparked fears of social unrest, which could undermine the power of the Communist party.
The fate of Chinese farmers has pushed itself to the top of the agenda at the National People's Congress, China's annual parliamentary meeting.
Premier Wen Jiabao kicked off the congress last week with a pledge to make the rural poor a "top priority".
"Rural incomes have grown too slowly, and development in different regions of the country is not balanced. The income gap is too wide among some members of society," Mr Wen said.
The book was first published by a literary magazine and the public snapped up 100,000 copies, with readers writing to newspapers to say how the book had them in tears of shame. Since then it has been published as a book and has sold another 200,000 copies.
The Communist Party's propaganda department has declared the book too sensitive to be publicised and shortly before the start of the National Party Congress said its recommendation was "neither publicise nor criticise". Stuck in political limbo, the book's authors, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, decline interviews with western journalists.
The authors reportedly got the idea for it when they were expecting their child four years ago. Ms Wu saw another mother and baby die because she could not afford a hospital delivery.
The couple, themselves the children of farmers, spent three years living among the rural poor, recording what they saw, including harrowing stories about routine injustice meted out to small farmers. In one case a farmer was beaten and killed for daring to demand a tax audit.
In another case, officials requisitioned supplies from neighbouring regions to fill the silos during a visit by former premier Zhu Rongji rather than admit the cupboard was bare, in a move similar to those employed by local authorities during Chairman Mao Zedong's disastrous Great Leap Forward agricultural programme.
While younger educated people are not surprised at the book's revelations, the older generation typically comment they had not realised that Zhu Rongji's rural policies had been so disastrous.
The book has prompted a leading official in Fuyang, in Anhui province, to sue the book's authors over claims in the book that when he was Communist Party secretary of Linquan county, he intimidated farmers who complained against high fees. His decision to file the lawsuit at a Fuyang local court, where his son is a judge, has met strong opposition from the authors' lawyers.
The book sold out in many places and pirated copies have come in their stead, but, in a sign of the interest in the book, are selling at the original price of 24 yuan, around €2.35 - normally a pirated book sells for around five yuan or 49 cents