The Family Plot - by Yan Lianke (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"Yan's storytelling has a luminous, irrepressible quality."--NPR

The brilliant and highly resonant new novel from one of China's most influential and important contemporary writers, exploring a son, father, and mother all consumed by the desire for success, even at the cost of one family member's life

In Gaotian Town on China's Central Plains, one perfectly normal working-class family is aspiring to better things. The son dreams of making enough money to go to America, while his father longs to build a new house like his middle-class neighbors, despite lacking the means to do so. His long-suffering wife worries about her only child's waywardness and feels she must take matters into her own hands. Unbeknownst to one another, each family member is thinking about killing one of the others.

Class tensions run high in the town, from the wealthiest and most envied family to the girl working at the beauty parlour who longs to escape, and the entrepreneurial grocer whose success has consequences for multiple lives. Set against the turbulent backdrop of social and cultural transformation, we witness a community undone by desperation and desire.

Yan Lianke unflinchingly recounts one family's slow descent into chaos in a darkly comic voice that is his alone. The Family Plot explores the push and pull of money, modernity, familial strife and the decay of tradition--and the lengths to which people will go as they strive for a better life.

Review Quotes

Praise for Yan Lianke:

Winner of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature
Winner of the Franz Kafka Prize
Royal Society of Literature International Writer Lifetime Award
Winner of the Lao She Prize
Winner of the Lu Xun Prize
Two-Time Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize

"Yan's writing does for the Chinese heartland what John Steinbeck did for the American West, or Thomas Hardy for Southwest England."--Newman Prize for Chinese Literature Citation

"Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures."--The Washington Post

"China's most controversial novelist . . . [A] preternatural gift for metaphor spills out of him unbidden."--The New Yorker

"Yan's subject is China, but he has condensed the human forces driving today's global upheavals into a bracing, universal vision."--The New York Times Book Review

"One of China's eminent and most controversial novelists and satirists."--Chicago Tribune

"His talent cannot be ignored."--The New York Times

"China's foremost literary satirist . . . He deploys offbeat humor, anarchic set pieces and surreal imagery to shed new light on dark episodes from modern Chinese history."--Financial Times

"[Yan is] criticizing the foundations of the Chinese state and the historical narrative on which it is built, while still somehow remaining one of its most lauded writers."--The New Republic

"There is nothing magical about Yan Lianke's realism . . . [with his] unflinching eye that nevertheless leaves you blinking with the whirling absurdities of the human condition."--Independent

"One of China's most important--and certainly most fearless--living writers."--Kirkus Reviews

"Yan Lianke reminds us that free expression is always in contention--to write is to risk the hand of power."--The Guardian

"Books are seldom brave. Most pass into the world unnoticed; many are destined to be read by only a small (if admiring) audience. Yan Lianke's novels are different." --The Telegraph

"Open up to the first page of any Yan Lianke novel, and you'll feel confident that you're in the hands of an assured and timeless storyteller. There's always something deeply psychological about his books--like he's probing at a desperate part of the psyche that most prefer to leave alone."--Literary Hub

About the Author

Yan Lianke is the author of works including Dream of Ding Village, The Day the Sun Died, The Four Books, Three Brothers, and Hard Like Water. He has been awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Royal Society of Literature International Writer Lifetime Award, and was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. He has received two of China's most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award. He was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China.

Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright and International Booker Prize-longlisted literary translator who has translated over thirty books from across the Chinese-speaking world, including Yan Lianke's memoir The Women. Originally from Singapore, Tiang now lives in Flushing, Queens.