Three Brothers - by Yan Lianke (Paperback)

About the Book

The English-language nonfiction debut one of China's most highly regarded writers, winner of the Franz Kafka Prize and twice finalist for the International Booker Prize, Three Brothers is a beautiful and heartwrenching memoir of the author's childhood and family life during the Cultural Revolution

Book Synopsis

The English-language nonfiction debut one of China's most highly regarded writers, winner of the Franz Kafka Prize and twice finalist for the International Booker Prize, Three Brothers is a beautiful and heartwrenching memoir of the author's childhood and family life during the Cultural Revolution

Review Quotes

Praise for Three Brothers

An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Memoir)

"This memoir of growing up during the Cultural Revolution focuses on Yan's memories of his family: his father, who toiled in their field; his elder uncle, who sold home-made socks and wore a jacket covered with patches; and his younger uncle, thought to be the one who got away, who worked long shifts at a cement factory. Yan recalls both the immense pleasure brought by simple luxuries-candies, sweet potatoes, a shiny polyester shirt-and the initial allure of the city, where life seemed to have meaning beyond the repetition of the harvest and building tile-roofed houses for one's children to get married in. He left, eventually settling in Beijing, only to yearn for his ancestral land."-New Yorker

"An elegiac tribute to [Yan's] father's generation, who labored for a lifetime to build traditional houses for their sons and provide dowries for their daughters. They succeeded, only to have their world swept away by rapid change . . . The land could do without him, he reflects, but he could not do without the land. 'Without that village, ' he laments, 'I would be nothing.'"-Isabel Hilton, Financial Times

"A moving story of family, loss, and self-discovery . . . Lianke also explores his own path toward becoming a writer, which makes for some of this book's most memorable moments."-Tobias Carroll, Words without Borders

"This engaging book asks readers to consider the nature of life and death, city versus country, and the impact generations can have on each other."-Winnipeg Free Press

"If Yan's memoir owes its existence to family, it is because every blessing in Yan's life owed its existence to family, as Yan's unflinching self-examination demonstrates plainly . . . Yan is concerned with death in this arresting work, not only the death of loved ones, but of a whole moment in Chinese history that, for ever more young people, is incomprehensible and even non-existent . . . As a peasant who was able to write himself out of the fields and into international celebrity, Yan poignantly shows that the most effective antidote to death is gratitude."-Full Stop

"Three Brothers includes length meditations on fate, change, happiness, and what Yan calls 'life' as opposed to 'living' . . . What breathes life into these themes and ideas is Yan's impressionistic form of family biography . . . By collapsing time, this almost Proustian method frequently brings both Yan and the reader face to face with himself."-South China Morning Post

"A leading Chinese novelist, famous for sharp satire, tells the story of his family's hardscrabble life with surprising tenderness . . . Complicated and powerful."-Booklist (starred review)

"Throughout the book, 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 stepped in metaphor and ultimately tremendously moving."-Kirkus Reviews

"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, author of Nine Continents

Praise for The Day the Sun Died

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly
Named a Best Fiction in Translation Selection by Kirkus Reviews
An Amazon Best Book of the Month

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

"A poetic

About the Author

Yan Lianke is the author of numerous story collections and novels, including The Day the Sun Died; The Years, Months, Days; The Explosion Chronicles; The Four Books; Lenin's Kisses; Serve the People!; and Dream of Ding Village. Among many accolades, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, 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 received two of China's most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award.