Cinema Love
In rural Fuzhou, China, a crumbling theater called the Workers' Cinema is where gay men quietly find each other while old war films play. Bao Mei sells the tickets and keeps their secrets. Jiaming Tang's debut follows several of these lives across thirty years, from the dangers of being discovered in China to the strain of building new lives as immigrants in New York. Moving among different characters and time periods, the novel traces forbidden love, marriages of convenience, and the long shadow that secrecy and exile cast over a person. It was a TeaTime Book Club pick by Dakota Johnson.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Cinema Love
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Across decades and continents, gay men who once met secretly in a run-down Chinese movie theater and the women who guarded their secrets carry the cost of those years to America.
Yes. Dakota Johnson chose Cinema Love as a TeaTime Book Club pick in May 2024.
Cinema Love was written by Jiaming Tang, published in 2024 by Dutton.
Cinema Love is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Cinema Love takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Cinema Love is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.