A few books to read before you come, or on the long flight home:
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"Empire of the Sun" by J. G. Ballard. The 1984 autobiographical novel of a British boy's wartime childhood in Shanghai, from his comfortable house in the International Settlement to internment in a Japanese civilian camp. Indispensable for understanding the foreign-concession era and the violence of its end.
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"Life and Death in Shanghai" by Nien Cheng. A first-person memoir of the Cultural Revolution by a Shell executive's widow who was held in solitary confinement for six years. Painful and clear.
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"The Soong Sisters" by Sterling Seagrave. Group biography of the three women who married Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek and the wealthy banker H. H. Kung — and helped shape 20th-century China. Stays close to Shanghai for the early chapters.
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"Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City" by Stella Dong. A vivid popular history of the international city from the Opium Wars to 1949 — gangsters, prostitution, opium, finance, the works.
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"Northern Girls" by Sheng Keyi. Contemporary fiction about a young migrant woman from rural Hunan trying to make it in Shenzhen and Shanghai. The Shanghai of the 2000s migrant generation is unfamiliar even to most foreign residents of the older city.