Book description
Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told
through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror
set against a landscape of gemlike beauty as the Chinese battle both
the Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s.
As the novel opens, a group of villagers, led by Commander Yu, the
narrator's grandfather, prepare to attack the advancing Japanese. Yu
sends his 14-year-old son back home to get food for his men; but as
Yu's wife returns through the sorghum fields with the food, the
Japanese start firing and she is killed.
Her death becomes the thread that links the past to the present and
the narrator moves back and forth recording the war's progress, the
fighting between the Chinese warlords and his family's history.
Mo Yan was born in 1956 in Shandong, northeastern China. The
author of over forty short stories and five novels, he is the most
critically acclaimed Chinese writer of his generation, in both China
and the West. The critically acclaimed film version of the novel,
Red Sorghum, won first prize in the Golden Bear Awards at the
Berlin Film Festival in 1988.
He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2012.
