Overview

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 Revolution It 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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9781784743154

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Full of love, sorrow, and tenderness, Yan Lianke's memoir offers a deeply heartfelt account of his family in the 1960s and 70s. Three Brothers is a must read for anyone who wants to understand post-Mao China and a new opportunity to experience more of what this extraordinary author conveys to us with his vivid and poetic style -- Xiaolu Guo Yan's heart remains firmly with the patient and stoic people who scratch a living from the soil, year after year, and for whom family is everything. It is an elegiac tribute to his father's generation -- Isabel Hilton * Financial Times * One of the masters of modern Chinese literature -- Jung Chang Yan depicts his provincial relatives with enormous heart and respect, acknowledging their sacrifices in a dark yet poignant meditation on grief and death... A memoir steeped in metaphor and ultimately tremendously moving. * Kirkus * The work of the Chinese author Yan Lianke reminds us that free expression is always in contention - to write is to risk the hand of power * Guardian * Fierce, funny, painful and playful...a great Chinese writer -- Amos Oz Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures * Washington Post * One of China's most loved writers -- Isabel Hilton * Financial Times * A celebration of the power of one family to hold together int he most punishing of circumstances * Asian Art Newspaper, *Books of the Year* *

One of the masters of modern Chinese literature -- Jung Chang The work of the Chinese author Yan Lianke reminds us that free expression is always in contention - to write is to risk the hand of power * Guardian * Fierce, funny, painful and playful...a great Chinese writer -- Amos Oz Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures * Washington Post *

Author Information

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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