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“A sorrowful but captivating novel about the price of progress in modern China. The book, which was censored in that country, builds to an act of violence that resonates with the impact of Greek tragedy or Shakespearean drama.” —Kirkus Reviews
Officially censored upon its Chinese publication, Dream of Ding Village is Chinese novelist Yan Lianke’s most important novel to date. Set in a poor village in Henan province, it is a deeply moving and beautifully written account of a blood-selling scandal in contemporary China.
As the book opens, Ding Village’s town directors, looking for a way to lift their village from poverty, decide to open a dozen blood-plasma collection stations. The directors hope to drain the townspeople of their blood and sell it to villages near and far. The novel focuses on one family, destroyed when one son rises to the top of the Party as he exploits the situation, while another is infected and dies. Based on a real-life blood-selling scandal in eastern China, the novel is the result of three years of undercover work by Yan, who once worked as an assistant to a well-known Beijing anthropologist in an effort to study a small village decimated by HIV/AIDS as a result of unregulated blood selling. The result is a passionate and steely critique of the rate at which China is developing—and what happens to those who get in the way.
Shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize
“His lyricism of despair, full of frenzied life, even when there is foam on lips, gives this novel of Yan Lianke its atrocious grace.”—Le Monde
“Yan Lianke denounces an alarming situation . . . his novel is a true revelation.”—Rolling Stone
“The defining work of his career; not just an elegantly crafted piece of literature but a devastating critique of China’s runaway development.”—Jonathan Watts, The Guardian
“[Yan Lianke] is one of China’s most successful fiction writers.”—The New York Times
“A sorrowful but captivating novel about the price of progress in modern China. The book, which was censored in that country, builds to an act of violence that resonates with the impact of Greek tragedy or Shakespearean drama.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A powerful look at the AIDS scandal in Henan province during the 1990s when many people became infected with HIV after selling their blood at private collection centers, Yan’s evocative novel focuses on one family at the heart of the tragedy in the fictional Ding Village . . . Communist ideals battle against capitalistic impulses and human nature in this grand, layered novel, a must-read for anyone interested in present-day China.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Gripping, swift, heartfelt, occasionally exhilarating and often surprising . . . Like Albert Camus’ The Plague, the novel works on more than one level, not only as a commentary on the growth of modern China but opening outward into an existential parable about what human beings think is important in this short, short life. All of us are living in Ding Village, infected with death and waiting out our days. In these lives, with a heightened awareness of death, every second counts, every bit of happiness matters. As they should in our own.”—Nick DiMartino, Shelf Awareness
“Censored in China, the latest novel by Yan (Serve the People!) to be translated into English is a brutal morality tale of a country undergoing transition . . . Written after three years of clandestine research on a real-life blood-selling scandal that was widespread in China, this book shines another grim spotlight on China’s abuses. Like his literary contemporaries Mo Yan and Yu Hua, Yan’s unflinching irreverence makes this Schadenfreude tragedy essential reading.”—Library Journal
“With great humor, Lianke describes the group of ‘nearly-deads’ reviving the heart of the school, where they have gone to avoid contaminating their nearest and dearest, a collectivist enterprise that is a revealing mirror of Chinese society. An archaic, gangrened society where the absurd goes hand in hand with the tragic, where one does business in marriages between the dead while respecting the local bureaucracy’s orders, where making love before dying seems to re-create utopia. A tender story that cuts to the bone.”—Transgue (France)
“With his novel Yan Lianke preserves the events in Henan from being forgotten.”—Deutsche Welle (Germany)
Yan Lianke is the author of the memoir Three Brothers and numerous novels and novellas, including Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, The Four Books, Lenin’s Kisses, Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, and The Years, Months, Days. Among many accolades, he was awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature and the Franz Kafka Prize, and was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer. He was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, and he has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, and the Prix Femina étranger. He has also received two of China’s most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award.