Description
Book SynopsisREPUBLISHED ON THE 30th ANNIVERSARY OF THE TIANANMEN MASSACRE, WITH A NEW AFTERWORD FROM THE AUTHOR AND A NEW COVER BY AI WEIWEI
Beijing Coma is Ma Jian's masterpiece. Spiked with dark wit, poetic beauty and deep rage, it takes the life, and near-death, of one young student to create a dazzling and excoriating novel about contemporary China
Monumental' Guardian
A landmark work of fiction' Daily Telegraph
A modern literary masterpiece' Sunday Express
Dai Wei lies in his bedroom, a prisoner in his body, after he was shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest ten years earlier and left in a coma. As his mother tends to him, and his friends bring news of their lives in an almost unrecognisable China, Dai Wei escapes into his memories, weaving together the events that took him from his harsh childhood in the last years of the Cultural Revolution to his student days at Beijing University.
As the minu
Trade Review
This is an epic yet intimate work that deserves to be recognised and to endure as the great Tiananmen novel ... a magnificent book brim-full of humanity, insight and humour ... beautifully translated by Flora Drew -- James Kynge * Financial Times *
Once in a while - perhaps every 10 years, or even every generation - a novel appears that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of a country at a defining moment in its history, but of the universal right to remember and to hope. It is, in every sense, a landmark work of fiction -- Tash Aw * Daily Telegraph *
A huge achievement ... a landmark account through fiction of a country whose rise has amazed the world, but which remains cloaked in shadows... finely written and translated -- Jonathan Fenby * The Times *
In scene after scene of black satire, lyric tenderness and desolating tragedy…this fearless epic of history and memory establishes the exiled Ma Jian as the Solzhenitsyn of China’s forgetful drive towards world-domination’ -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent *
Monumental...riveting. This vivid, pungent, often blackly funny book is a mighty gesture of remembrance against the encroaching forces of silence -- James Lasdun * Guardian *
Powerful and exhilirating... Simultaneously a large-scale portrait of citizens writing in the grip of the party and the state and a strikingly intimate study of the fragility of the body and the persistence of self and memory -- Chandrahas Choudhury * Observer *
A modern literary masterpiece ... Ma Jian has created an intense, passionate and painful-to-read parable for today.. The elegant and bravura writing of Ma Jian is utterly convincing * Sunday Express *
