Lots of Chinese women have given us their stories -- now a young man writes about his disillusion with the Communist system and an extraordinary journey that he made around China in search of himself and his country.
'My painter friends think I am a die-hard conservative, my writer friends think I am a man of loose morals. In Jushlin Temple I am a quiet disciple, in the Propaganda Department I am a decadent youth. Women call me a cynical artist, the police call me a hooligan. Well, they can think what they like. I only have 20,000 days left to live.' In 1983, Ma Jian turned 30 and was...

From the award-winning author of Red Dust, comes a virtuoso piece of 'red humour' - a darkly funny novel about the absurdities and cruelties of life in modern China. Every week, a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood donor meet for dinner. They are unlikely friends - one of them tortured by his 'art', the other fat and wealthy from the earthy business of providing spare blood for the citizens of China. Over the course of one especially gastronomic evening, the writer starts to complain about his latest Party commission: the story of an ordinary soldier who sacrifices his...

A Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, the divide between fact and fiction becomes confused and the man is drawn deep into an alien culture that haunts his dreams.

Dai Wei lies in a coma after he was shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest ten years earlier. As the minute-by-minute chronicling of the lead-up to his shooting becomes even more intense, the reader is caught in a gripping, emotional journey where the boundaries between life and death are increasingly blurred.