Search results for ""Author Yan Lianke""

‘One of the masters of modern Chinese literature’ Jung ChangThis 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

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La muerte recorre las calles de la otrora próspera aldea Ding. Sus habitantes desaparecen igual que las hojas de los árboles en otoño. Una extraña fiebre se lleva sus vidas. Es la enfermedad de quienes hace ocho años vendieron su sangre por unas pocas monedas. Narrada por el pequeño Xiao Qiang, esta novela, de una sobrecogedora belleza, nos adentra en la historia de la aldea Ding, una de tantas afectadas por el escándalo de la sangre contaminada de la provincia china de Henan. Los aldeanos, incitados a vender grandes cantidades de su propia sangre, con la que se enriquecieron unos pocos, son ahora víctimas de la mayor epidemia conocida en el país. Abandonados e ignorados por las autoridades, solo pueden esperar la llegada de la muerte.

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LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2017 With the Yi River on one side and the Balou Mountains on the other, the village of Explosion was founded a thousand years ago by refugees fleeing a volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era, the name takes on a new significance as the rural community grows explosively from a small village to a town to a city to a vast megalopolis. Behind this rapid expansion are three rival clans linked together by a web of ambition, madness and greed. Together they transform their hometown into a Babylon of modern times -- an unrivalled urban superpower built on lies, sex and thievery.'One of the masters of modern Chinese literature' Jung Chang

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'One of the masters of modern Chinese literature' Jung ChangA 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

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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.

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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

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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 RevolutionIt 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.

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'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 TwitterA breakneck adventure story following the erotic love affair of party cadres Aijun and Hongmei during China's Cultural RevolutionThis 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**

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2016'One of China's greatest living authors and fiercest satirists' GuardianIn the ninety-ninth district of a sprawling labour camp, the Author, Musician, Scholar, Theologian and Technician - and hundreds just like them - are undergoing Re-education, to restore their revolutionary zeal and credentials. In charge of this process is the Child, who delights in draconian rules, monitoring behaviour and confiscating treasured books. But when bad weather arrives, followed by the ‘three bitter years’, the intellectuals are abandoned by the regime and left on their own to survive. Divided into four narratives, The Four Books tells the story of the Great Famine, one of China’s most devastating and controversial periods. WINNER OF THE FRANZ KAFKA PRIZE 2014NOMINATED FOR CZECH AWARD MAGNESIA LITERA 2014HUA ZHONG WORLD CHINESE LITERATURE PRIZE 2013FINALIST FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2013WINNER OF THE HUA ZHONG WORLD CHINESE LITERATURE PRIZE 2013 SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE 2012SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER 2012SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE 2011WINNER OF THE LAO SHE LITERATURE AWARD 2004WINNER OF THE LU XUN AWARD 1997

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Multi-prizewinning and internationally acclaimed Yan Lianke -- 'China's most controversial novelist' (New Yorker) -- returns with a campus novel like no other following a young Buddhist as she journeys through worldly temptationTo tell the truth, religious faith is really just a matter of believing stories. The world is governed by stories, and it is for the sake of stories that everyone lives on this earth.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.In this profoundly otherworldly novel, Chinese master Yan Lianke remakes the campus novel in typically visionary fashion, dropping readers into an allegorical world ostensibly far from our own, but which reflects our own questions and struggles right back at us.** 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

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A FINALIST FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZEDeep within the Balou mountains lies a small rural town populated by disabled people. Blind, deaf and disfigured, the 197 citizens of the Village of Liven have until now enjoyed a peaceful, mutually supportive life out of sight and mind of the government. But when an unseasonal snowstorm wipes out that year’s crops, a county official dreams up a scheme that will raise money for the district and boost his career. He convinces the villagers to set up a travelling freak-show, to include Blind Tonghua’s Acute Listening Act and Deafman Ma’s Firecrackers-on-the-Ear. With the money, he intends to buy Lenin’s embalmed corpse from an ailing Russia and install it in a splendid mausoleum in the mountains to attract tourism to this sleepy district. However, as we all know, even the best intentions can go awry.

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