MICHELE NORRIS, host: It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.

MELISSA BLOCK, host: And I'm Melissa Block.

What if, through an accident, you lost your ability to express yourself in your native language and if all your communication depended on speaking and understanding a foreign tongue?

That is the scenario in a debut novel by the Chinese-American writer Ruiyan Xu. Alan Cheuse has this review of "The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai."

ALAN CHEUSE: Theres a kind of useful symmetry (對稱性，對稱美) at the outset of Xu's appealing first novel. At the beginning of the book, Li Jing, a Charlottesville(夏洛茨維爾,美國城市)-born Chinese stock trader, survives a gas explosion in a restaurant but because of trauma from the accident, he loses his ability to speak Chinese.

His old professor-father and his wife, Meiling, a book editor, are understandably distressed. Chinese has become to Li Jing, well, Greek to him. For example, he can hear the differences in tone that make meaning clear in Chinese but, as Xu writes, he finds it impossible to enunciate (發音，(清楚地)表達) the four variations.

For him, its' like hearing a piece of music and then looking down at the black and white keys of a piano, not knowing how each note corresponds to the identical-looking keys before you.

Wife and father make a plan with the local hospital to fly in Rosalyn Neal, an Oklahoma City doctor who's an expert in aphasia(失語癥). Dr. Neal has her own problems, mainly having just suffered the explosion of her failed marriage, and the exotic sights and sounds of Shanghai only add to her confusion.

She works with Li Jing in English to help restore his Chinese, but the main thing that happens - they fall in love, with upsetting results for the family.

Novelist Ruiyan Xu writes in English, so she doesn't enunciate the four tonal variations of Chinese. The tone of her story about love in modern Shanghai seems just right.

BLOCK: The novel from Ruiyan Xu is called "The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai". Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.