Series

Old Wang drives nights. Each chapter is one passenger, one route across the city, and one more thing he learns about the fare he keeps hoping to pick up again.

Tuantuan is afraid of the dark, until a firefly leads him through a door in his own wall into the place every small lost thing waits to be found -- including, it turns out, something of his own.

Su Qing quits her office job to open a tiny café on an old street, with one year's rent and no experience. Twenty everyday conversations, from the job interview to the landlord, and the street that won't let it close.

Every night at nine, someone plays the piano in the flat above Jiajia's. Everyone says that flat has been empty for a year.

Chengcheng is the shortest boy in his year and the last name on the basketball team's list. What he can do is see everyone on the court, and practise free throws alone at six every morning.

Jianing can't find a job in the city, so she agrees to run her aunt's six-room guesthouse in a fishing town for one summer. Twenty guests, twenty everyday conversations -- bookings, a typhoon, a lost wallet, a one-star review -- and an old man who books Room Six every August and asks for two cups of tea.

Old bikes are vanishing from the shed in Locust Tree Compound, one a week. Susu, who reads detective novels, and Niuniu, who mostly wants to hold the flashlight, set out to catch the thief -- and find something in a basement that the whole compound has to decide about.

Haohao, a city boy who lives on his phone, is sent to his silent grandfather's river village for a term. The village dragon boat is six rowers short, Haohao can't swim, and the drumsticks his grandfather played for thirty years are wrapped in red cloth in the attic.

For two years Anning's dad has been a face on a phone, building a bridge in Kenya. Now he's home -- louder, browner, up at five -- and he feels like a stranger in her room. Then she opens the suitcase he never unpacked.

Letian talks more than anyone in Year Six. The new girl put next to him doesn't talk at all: Xinyu is deaf. A notebook between their desks becomes a sign a day, a Saturday class, a secret, a betrayal -- and a talent show where the whole class sings with their hands.

Lu Jing is forty-two, bakes bread in Nanchang and has never driven -- but her mother is ill and the hospital is two buses away. Twenty everyday situations, from the sign-up form and the eye test to reverse parking, a failed test, a petrol station, a second-hand car, a car park and a small bump, with a gruff instructor who is secretly kind.

Fanfan, ten, spends his own savings on the old grey parrot nobody wants at a Fuzhou bird market, because all it says is: Axiu, dinner's ready. A phone number that no longer exists, a banyan tree in the old lanes, a neighbour who remembers -- and in a care home, a ninety-year-old man who hasn't spoken in a year.

Zou Yu, eleven, has just moved to Tianjin and hasn't said a word at school. Then, in the park by the Hai River at six in the morning, he finds an old man playing ping-pong against a wall, alone. A year of six o'clock mornings: the grip, the serve, a rival who laughs at his bat, a box of old trophies under a bed -- and a final with two old men on their feet at the back.

In an old Suzhou lane stands a ginkgo two hundred years old: the barber works under it, an old couple married under it, every child has climbed it. Then a notice goes up: the lane is to become a road, and the tree is in the way. Twelve-year-old Niannian starts collecting stories -- and finds the neighbours who want the road aren't villains either.

Anran, eleven, lives on her phone -- until her parents send her to a summer camp on the Inner Mongolian grassland, where there's no signal. A herding family, a yurt, salty milk tea, an old white mare called Snowflake, five hundred sheep, a lamb lost in a storm, a sky full of stars, and a boy who thinks city kids can't do anything.

Sofia, sixteen, flies from Rome to spend a school year with a family in Changzhou: a dad who jokes, a mum who worries, a grandmother who speaks only dialect, and a host sister who doesn't want a sister. Twenty everyday situations -- a bus card, a SIM card, a clinic, a disastrous haircut, the bank, Mid-Autumn, getting lost -- until she has two homes.

Sensen's dad is a panda keeper in the rainy mountains of Ya'an, and Sensen thinks the pandas get more of his dad than he does. Then he has to spend the summer at the panda base -- just as an old mother panda gives birth to a cub the size of an apple. Twenty chapters of bamboo, a midnight birth, a storm, first steps, panda suits, and letting go.

Panpan, eleven, plays football with the boys in Meizhou, but they only let her in goal. Then a new PE teacher who once played for the province starts a girls' team -- if she can find eleven players. Twenty chapters: borrowed boots, a seven-nil defeat, a match against the boys, an injury, a mother who says no, and a grandmother with a sixty-year-old secret.

When Grandpa dies, Grandma comes from her village near Yancheng to live in Nuonuo's small Shanghai flat -- and the only place for her bed is his room. She gets up at five, saves every plastic bag and talks to everyone in a dialect nobody understands. Twenty chapters: the metro, square dancing, a lost grandma, a phone lesson, five hundred steamed buns, and two beds in one room.

Feifei's mum, a heart doctor, has spent a year working in Lhasa. This summer Feifei and her dad take the train to see her: thirty-odd hours across the plateau, past Qinghai Lake and over the snowy Tanggula Pass, sharing a compartment with Grandma Zhuoma and her grandson Tashi. Twenty chapters: altitude sickness, butter tea, Mum's hospital, a little patient, a lake in the sky, and a hard decision.