Last fall, an old friend I was visiting, whose work on China I admire, showed me excitedly a copy of a new book that she said she loved and thought I would, too. It was Jie Li's Shanghai Homes. Since I only had a chance to flip through the pages quickly, I was delighted to get an email several months later asking me to review it. And yet, in spite of that conversation – or, to be honest, because of it – I felt uneasy as soon as I had agreed to do the review. My worry was that, coming to it with such high expectations, I would be disappointed and this would colour unfairly my review of a scholar's first book. My misgivings increased when I saw the phrase “silently stunning” on its back cover. I need not have worried: the book is as good as my friend said. It actually is – and I doubt I've ever used this word in a review before – stunning.

In exploring the alleyway neighbourhoods where her parents grew up, depicting the ways that political and economic shifts altered or failed to change patterns of daily life and interpersonal interactions, Li moves between several genres. These include ethnography, oral history, memoir and micro-history. She also shifts between registers as a writer. The opening pages are in standard academic prose; further on come passages that are more impressionistic; and sometimes we get long quotations, which allow interview subjects to tell their own stories in an uninterrupted fashion, à la works by Studs Terkel and Sang Ye. Complementing the pastiche aspects of the words in Shanghai Homes are its illustrations. It includes many family photographs and also, more unusually, some line drawings by the author's parents. Both kinds of illustrations prove effective in complementing and breathing added life into vignettes.

I particularly like the opening of a section titled “Seesawing destinies in no. 111, Alliance Lane” (pp. 50–52) that features an extended look at a striking photograph. The shot shows an extended family on holiday in Hangzhou soon after the 1949 Revolution, and the viewer's eye takes in immediately such things as the contrasting modes of dress of members of different generations, and the contrast between the formal poses struck by elders up front and children climbing on a Buddhist statue in the background. Via Li's contextualization of it, we learn hidden things, such as that the family grouping includes a concubine as well as a wife.

One section that made me appreciate Li's talent is titled “An intellectual family and clandestine reading in No. 11” (pp. 122–29), which focuses on the secret thrill that her relatives and other residents of alleyway homes experienced during the Cultural Revolution when surreptitiously poring over and circulating among themselves illicit books by banned Western novelists. This brought to mind the “Reading” chapter in Yu Hua's China in Ten Words, a favourite book of mine. What struck me as extraordinary was how well, in stylistic terms, the junior scholar's handling of the topic held up when placed beside the justly acclaimed literary figure's treatment of the same issue. Shanghai Homes, this confirmed, is that very rare work that will add to on-going debates among specialists – in this case about the nature of political campaigns, urbanization and cultural shifts in late Republican through post-Mao times – yet might also be something to suggest to an intellectually curious non-academic friend asking for a recent work on China for a book club.

I would, however, suggest that members of that imaginary book club begin by skipping the opening pages on methodology and start with a middle section where Li's storytelling strengths are clearly displayed. Perhaps with the tale of young love in that same “Clandestine reading” chapter, in which Li segues from describing her mother hiding Pushkin poems between the pages of People's Daily and looking at the way forbidden novels could serve as romantic symbols (p. 127) to describing the role that a Mao badge, “a much less risky love token,” played in, almost, bringing together the author's mother's younger sister and a local boy. Li writes:

Lest this long quote suggest otherwise, Shanghai Homes does not shy away from dark subjects. Not long before the passage just quoted, for example, we read of a neighbour committing suicide in desperation after being attacked as a “bad element,” and there are other instances in which those familiar with the traumas of various periods will come across anecdotes that reinforce and add personal dimensions to well-known developments. The most memorable parts of the book, though, are those that complicate standard notions of relatively clean breaks between eras. Li is fond of the metaphor of the palimpsest, and she shows that this is something that can be useful for making sense of everything from the urban fabric of a city's architecture, to interior decor in homes, to the coexistence of ideas about love and marriage from periods on opposite sides of the divides between supposedly discrete epochs.

Shanghai Homes is a slim book, which comes emblazoned with a cover showing an unpretentious alleyway scene. Make no mistake, though, this is a major book, not a minor one. And that cover photo is deceptively simple: as humble as the imagery is, the way it is framed has a magnetic effect, pulling readers in and making them want to know what exactly is going on behind the closed door at the end of the alley. Li's writing exerts a similar pull and the glimpses she gives of life inside the alleyway homes are very special indeed. My only major complaint about the book relates to timing. I wish it had been published earlier. Had it been, I would have drawn on it when writing Global Shanghai, 1850–2010, and parts of that book would have been much the better for it.