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Reading lists

Where to start with Yan Lianke

Hard Like Water

The new masterpiece by eminent Chinese writer Yan Lianke . . . two revolutionaries take matters disastrously into their own hands while conducting a crazed affair

A blistering tour de force . . . Carlos Rojas's exceptional translation makes English feel new again. Yan's linguistic daring, and the novel's relentless stream of provocative images and observations, create a sensuous and riveting world . . . a sharp, desperately moving analysis of the logic of ideology

A fascinating work . . . Yan's challenge, to his samizdat readers in China and those beyond, is to look in the murky glass of ambition and self-deception and find the face that resembles their own

A vivid, even lurid, portrait of the vandalistic savagery and hypocrisy of the post-1966 Cultural Revolution . . . Well-served by Carlos Rojas's agile and richly textured translation

The novel, a parody, sets itself up as a kind of Maoist Anna Karenina . . . At its core, Hard Like Water seeks to make a mockery of claims to political purity. As Hongmei and Aijun arouse each other with propaganda slogans and revolutionary citations, the novel pokes fun at how easily an ideology can be contorted to satisfy individual desires

A piercing satire of Communism and the language of revolutions

Yan probes the darkness and absurdity of Chinese society and history with a sexy satirical tale of the Cultural Revolution as wrought in a small village . . . distinctive and punchy. Yan's exuberant and unflinching tragicomedy is undeniably appealing

Surreal and amusing, biting and fun

A gritty, memorable story . . . Yan's study of power and class struggle becomes, in the end, a near-classic tragedy

Yan's signature biting wit creates another indelible work of bittersweet humor and socio-political insight

Predicted to become a new future classic . . . this is a powerful, multi-faceted book that questions everything from marriage to sexual desire, power and the dangers of hubris

Gao Aijun, the narrator of this boisterous novel, set during the Cultural Revolution, finds his life charmless: his village is like "a pool of stagnant water," and his wife makes him feel "a clump of cotton" in his throat. Then he meets a beautiful woman, also married, and, to attract her, sets out to lead the "revolution" in their village. In speech larded with Mao quotes and traditional maxims, Gao reveals how their romance, fuelled by the feverish political climate, pitches the village into ever-escalating extremism -- a years-long parade of self-advancing schemes culminating in an unthinkable end

Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. He is the author of numerous novels and short-story collections, including Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, Lenin's Kisses, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles, The Day the Sun Died and Hard Like Water. He has been awarded the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize, the Lao She Literary Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award and the Franz Kafka Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize, the Principe de Asturias Prize for Letters, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the FT/Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices Award and the prix Femina Étranger. The Day the Sun Died won the Dream of the Red Chamber Award for the World's Most Distinguished Novel in Chinese. He lives and writes in Beijing.

'The new masterpiece by eminent Chinese writer Yan Lianke . . . two revolutionaries take matters disastrously into their own hands while conducting a crazed affair' MARGARET ATWOOD on Twitter 
 
A breakneck adventure story following the erotic love affair of party cadres Aijun and Hongmei during China's Cultural Revolution 
 
This is the story of the freewheeling love affair between married soldier Aijun and Hongmei, a beautiful young woman from his village in the Balou Mountains. 
 
Intoxicated with one another, Aijun and Hongmei hurl themselves into their town's revolutionary struggle. Spending their days and nights stamping out feudalism, writing pamphlets and organising rallies, they become inseparable: they are the engines of history. 
 
But as their political activity reaches new heights, so does the danger of getting caught... 
 
'A blistering tour-de-force... Sensuous and riveting' MADELEINE THIEN, Booker-shortlisted author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing 
 
'Fascinating... This tale of an illicit tryst during the Cultural Revolution is a stinging satire' The Times 
 
**A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST FICTION IN TRANSLATION BOOK 2021**

Serve the People!

A brilliantly comic satire about a love affair from the visionary, world-class storyteller

One of China's greatest living authors and fiercest satirists

Brilliantly exposes the emptiness of Maoist ideals and the fraudulent ends for which they were used, but also relates a sorrowful tale of compromised relationships and modest hopes left unfulfilled

A scathing sendup of life in 1960s China during the chaos of the country's Cultural Revolution...a wonderfully biting sature, brimming with absurdity, humor and wit

A brilliantly comic satire about a love affair from the visionary, world-class storyteller. 
 
Set in 1967, at the peak of the Mao cult, this is the tale of a forbidden love affair between Liu Lian - the bored wife of a military commander - and a young soldier, Wu Dawang. 
 
When Liu Lian establishes a rule that Wu Dawang must attend to her needs whenever the household's wooden 'Serve the People!' sign is removed from its usual place, he vows to obey. What follows is both an enthralling love story and a deliciously comic satire on the political and sexual taboos of Mao's regime. 
 
'Drips with the kind of satire that can only come from deep within the machinery of Chinese communism' Financial Times

Dream of Ding Village

From 'one of the masters of modern Chinese literature' (Jung Chang), a searing novel that traces the destruction of a community in Communist China

One of China's most successful fiction writers

Yan Lianke denounces an alarming situation...his novel is a true revelation

A sorrowful but captivating novel about the price of progress in modern China... Resonates with the impact of Greek tragedy or Shakespearean drama

'One of the masters of modern Chinese literature' Jung Chang 
 
A searing novel that traces the destruction of a community in communist China. 
 
Told through the eyes of Xiao Qiang, a young boy, this deeply moving novel shares the tragic story of the blood-contamination scandal in China's Henan province. 
 
Looking for a way to lift Ding Village from poverty, its directors and organisers open blood-plasma collection stations, hoping to sell the plasma to those in need. At first the scheme is a commercial success. Soon, however, whole communities are wiped out after contracting HIV. As Xiao narrates the fate of Ding Village, his family is torn apart by suspicion and retribution. 
 
'The defining work of his career... A devastating critique of China's runaway development' Guardian

The Years, Months, Days

A powerful fable about the goodness in mankind by 'one of China's greatest living authors' (Guardian), newly available in English for the first time.

A terrible drought hits the population of a small mountain village and they flee to better climes. Incapable of marching for days, one old man and his blind dog stay behind, keeping watch over his single ear of corn. Every day is a victory over death. 
 
The Years, Months, Days is a universal story, an homage to all that is good in mankind. A bestseller in China and now available in English for the first time, this is a powerful, moving fable by ‘one of China’s greatest living authors’ (Guardian).

Memories of My Family

Three Brothers

An intimate record of rural family life from ‘China’s most controversial novelist’ (New Yorker)

Full of love, sorrow, and tenderness, Yan Lianke’s memoir offers a deeply heartfelt account of his family in the 1960s and 70s. Three Brothers is a must read for anyone who wants to understand post-Mao China and a new opportunity to experience more of what this extraordinary author conveys to us with his vivid and poetic style

Yan’s heart remains firmly with the patient and stoic people who scratch a living from the soil, year after year, and for whom family is everything. It is an elegiac tribute to his father’s generation

One of the masters of modern Chinese literature

Yan depicts his provincial relatives with enormous heart and respect, acknowledging their sacrifices in a dark yet poignant meditation on grief and death... A memoir steeped in metaphor and ultimately tremendously moving.

The work of the Chinese author Yan Lianke reminds us that free expression is always in contention – to write is to risk the hand of power

Fierce, funny, painful and playful…a great Chinese writer

Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures

A celebration of the power of one family to hold together int he most punishing of circumstances

In this heartfelt memoir, Yan Lianke brings the reader into his boyhood home in Song County, Henan Province, painting a richly detailed portrait of rural China during the Cultural Revolution 
 
It is a hard but loving childhood. Yan’s family carve out a modest existence, though food is often so scarce they have to find edible bark and clay for sustenance. Working sixteen-hour shifts in a quarry, Yan’s hands become as crooked as twigs, but the satisfaction of hard physical labour and earning money to support his family proves intoxicating. Reading novels is an escape for Yan, and he yearns to become a writer after hearing about a woman who was allowed to remain in the city of Harbin after publishing her first novel. 
 
Caught between his obligations as a son and a brother, and his longing for a new life, Yan eventually joins the army. He returns years later to find his father’s health rapidly deteriorating in the face of his desperate efforts to build a traditional tile-roofed house for each of his sons. 
 
Chronicling the extraordinary lives of his father and two uncles, as well as his own, Three Brothers is a celebration of the power of one family to hold together in the most punishing of circumstances. Sharply alive to the cyclical nature of history, and the power of familial guilt, it also shows how the pen can be a route to freedom.

The Day the Sun Died

WINNER OF THE Dream of the Red Chamber Award for the World's Most Distinguished Novel in Chinese

A winner of the Kafka Prize and a frequently cited contender for the Nobel, Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures

Yan Lianke, one of the most important literary interpreters of contemporary China, combines shocking satire and sharp imagery to address the moral vacuum at the heart of the country's extraordinary transformation

Yan Lianke's powerful dystopian novel, narrated by a teenage boy, is set during a single night in a remote Chinese village... The underlying political message, that China is sleepwalking to disaster under President Xi Ping, could hardly be plainer... But there is so much colour in the book, as the sleepwalkers act more and more oddly, that politics seems secondary. Poignant and unsettling

Masterful...a brave and unforgettable novel, full of tragic poise and political resonance, masterfully shifting between genres and ways of storytelling, exploring the ways in which history and memory are resurrected, how dark, private desires seep or flood out

A remarkable novel – open, like most good novels, to a variety of interpretations. The events described are incredible; the atmosphere all too believable

This exuberant but sinister fable confirms its author as one of China's most audacious and enigmatic novelists

Yan Lianke hopes to illuminate the darkness that underpins contemporary China, and in the process help readers wake up from what Yan, like Joyce before him, suggests is he nightmare of history

A poetic nightmare...the creepiest book I've read in years... Yan's understated wit runs through these pages like a snake through fallen leaves...a wake-up call about the path we're on

‘One of the masters of modern Chinese literature’ Jung Chang 
 
This gripping dystopia contrasts the reality of life in China today with the sunny optimism of the ‘Chinese dream’. 
 
One dusk in early June, in a town deep in the Balou mountains, fourteen-year-old Li Niannian notices that something strange is going on. As the residents would usually be settling down for the night, instead they start appearing in the streets and fields. There are people everywhere. 
 
Li Niannian watches, mystified. Until he realises the people are dreamwalking, carrying on with their daily business as if the sun hadn’t already gone down. And before too long, as more and more people succumb, in the black of night all hell breaks loose. 
 
Set over the course of one night, The Day the Sun Died pits chaos and darkness against the bright ‘Chinese dream’ promoted by President Xi Jinping. We are thrown into the middle of an increasingly strange and troubling waking nightmare as Li Niannian and his father struggle to save the town, and persuade the beneficent sun to rise again. 
 
Praise for Yan Lianke's books: 
 
‘Nothing short of a masterpiece’ Guardian 
 
‘A hyper-real tour de force, a blistering condemnation of political corruption and excess’ Financial Times 
 
‘Mordant satire from a brave fabulist’ Daily Mail 
 
‘Exuberant and imaginative’ Sunday Times 
 
‘I can think of few better novelists than Yan, with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth’ New York Times Book Review

Yan Lianke

Carlos Rojas

Heart Sutra...has startling pleasures... similes are sharp, synaesthetic and anchored in the lives of the characters

Heart Sutra is a warm-hearted, if not gentle, satire that skewers religious institutions without mocking faith itself . . . A deeply satisfying read . . . Yan's storytelling has a luminous, irrepressible quality

One of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures

Picaresque, but with serious matters of faith, love, and political wrangling at its fast-beating heart

Heart Sutra brings clarity to the dynamic and fraught relations between organised religion and the party on a broader scale and does not shy from difficult histories

Prizewinning Yan Lianke returns with a campus novel like no other following a young Buddhist as she journeys through worldly temptation 
 
Yahui is a young Buddhist at university. But this is no ordinary university. It is populated by every faith in China: Buddhists, Daoists, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims who jostle alongside one another in the corridors of learning, and whose deities are never far from the classroom. 
 
Her days are measured out making elaborate religious papercuts, taking part in highly charged tug-of-war competitions between the faiths and trying to resist the daily temptation to return to secular life and abandon the ascetic ideals that are her calling. Everything seems to dangle by a thread. But when she meets a Daoist student called Mingzheng, an inexorable romance of mythic proportions takes hold of her. 
 
** Beautiful edition illustrated throughout with beautiful original papercuts ** 
 
'One of China's greatest living authors' Guardian 
 
'His talent cannot be ignored' New York Times 
 
'China's foremost literary satirist' Financial Times

Yan Lianke

Praise for Heart Sutra

Darkly exhilarating and daring

Heart Sutra...has startling pleasures... similes are sharp, synaesthetic and anchored in the lives of the characters

Heart Sutra is a warm-hearted, if not gentle, satire that skewers religious institutions without mocking faith itself . . . A deeply satisfying read . . . Yan's storytelling has a luminous, i ...

Darkly exhilarating and daring

Heart Sutra...has startling pleasures... similes are sharp, synaesthetic and anchored in the lives of the characters

Heart Sutra is a warm-hearted, if not gentle, satire that skewers religious institutions without mocking faith itself . . . A deeply satisfying read . . . Yan's storytelling has a luminous, i ...

Darkly exhilarating and daring

Heart Sutra...has startling pleasures... similes are sharp, synaesthetic and anchored in the lives of the characters

Heart Sutra is a warm-hearted, if not gentle, satire that skewers religious institutions without mocking faith itself . . . A deeply satisfying read . . . Yan's storytelling has a luminous, i ...

Books by Yan Lianke

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