The Four Books Yan Lianke Carlos Rojas by Yan Lianke, Carlos Rojas 9780802191878, 0802191878, B00OV9D9CW instant download after payment.

Yan Lianke’s compelling novel tells the story of one of China’s most controversial periods, the Great Famine, in which at least 45 million people died. Translated by Carlos Rojas.

1958, China. In a sprawling labour camp like hundreds of others, inmates must meet challenges set by the higher-ups: to grow an ever-spiralling amount of wheat and to smelt vast quantities of steel. The stakes are high: they can win their freedom if they collect enough red blossoms, awarded for effort, obedience and informing on others. But when bad weather arrives, followed by three bitter years of The Great Famine, the inmates are abandoned by the regime and left on their own to survive.

"Yan’s fiction is, in fact, arch and playful...He deploys offbeat humour, anarchic set pieces and surreal imagery to shed new light on dark episodes from modern Chinese history. His newly translated The Four Books... explores one of the 20th century’s ghastliest events...[focusing] on the 99th district, a labour camp for bourgeois “counter-revolutionaries”...who have been sent to the countryside to participate in the Great Leap... Yan’s prose, ably translated by Carlos Rojas, alternates between blank descriptions of the horror — “the ninety-ninth was bloated and listless, and periodically someone would die” — and extravagant symbolism: crucifixes, infernos, wheat sheaves mysteriously swollen with blood. It’s not exactly subtle but these Grand Guignol flourishes seem grimly appropriate."  -  David Evans, The Financial Times

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 and Lenin’s Kisses. The winner of multiple literary awards in China, including the Lao She, Lu Xun and Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize, he was also awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014 and has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.