Description
Book SynopsisFrog is a richly complex new novel about China''s one-child policy by Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2012.
Gugu is beautiful, charismatic and of an unimpeachable political background. A respected midwife, she combines modern medical knowledge with a healer''s touch to save the lives of village women and their babies.
After a disastrous love affair with a defector leaves Gugu reeling, she throws herself zealously into enforcing China''s draconian new family-planning policy by any means necessary, be it forced sterilizations or late-term abortions. Tragically, her blind devotion to the Party line spares no one, not her own family, not even herself.
Once beloved, Gugu becomes the living incarnation of a reviled social policy violently at odds with deeply-rooted social values. Spanning the pre-revolutionary era and the country''s modern-day consumer society, Mo Yan''s taut and engrossing examination of Chinese life will be read for generations to come.
''Mo Yan deserves a place in world literature. His voice will find its way into the heart of the reader, just as Kundera and Garcia Marquez have'' Amy Tan
''One of China''s leading writers . . . his work rings with refreshing authenticity'' Time
''His idiom has the spiralling invention of much world literature of a high order, from Vargas Llosa to Rushdie''Observer
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
Trade ReviewHarrowing, haunting, poignant . . . Mo Yan proves himself a novelist of the highest calibre * Financial Times *
One of China's leading writers . . . his work rings with refreshing authenticity * Time *
Takes solid aim at perhaps the most notorious act of social planning the Chinese Communist Party has engineered. An expansive, fascinating cultural-political history. * Irish Independent *
His idiom has the spiralling invention and mytho-maniacal quality of much world literature of a high order, from Vargas Llosa to Rushdie * Observer *
There is no denying the ease and beauty of his storytelling . . . this is often difficult subject matter - but never hard to read * West Australian *
Like Kafka, Yan has the ability to examine his society through a variety of lenses, creating fanciful, Metamorphosis-like transformations or evoking the numbing bureaucracy and casual cruelty of modern governments. Deftly explores the human toll of national policy and historical forces * Publishers Weekly *
Frog has that wonderful sense of flipping between the mundane and the fantastic... Both heartbreaking and absurd... a tragicomic tale * Adelaide Advertiser *
