Ma Jian

Meili, a young peasant woman born in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a village school teacher, and a distant descendant of Confucius. They have a daughter, but desperate for a son to carry on his illustrious family line, Kongzi gets Meili pregnant again without waiting for official permission. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, mother, father and daughter escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life.For years they drift south through the poisoned waterways and ruined landscapes of China, picking up work as they go along, scavenging for necessities and flying from police detection. As Meilis body continues to be invaded by her husband and assaulted by the state, she fights to regain control of her fate and that of her unborn child.

A poetic and unflinching fable about tyranny, guilt, and the erasure of history, by the banned Chinese writer hailed as Chinas Solzhenitsyn.In seven dream-like episodes, Ma Jian charts the psychological disintegration of a Chinese provincial leader who is haunted by nightmares of his violent past. From exile, Ma Jian shoots an arrow at President Xi Jinpings China Dream propaganda, creating a biting satire of totalitarianism that reveals what happens to a nation when it is blinded by materialism and governed by violence and lies. Blending tragic and absurd reality with myth and fantasy, this dystopian novel is a portrait not of an imagined future, but of China today.

Dai Wei is a medical student and a pro-democracy protestor in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Caught by a soldier's bullet, he falls into a deep coma; as soon as the hospital authorities discover he is an activist, his mother is forced to take him home. She allows pharmacists access to Dai Wei's body and sells his urine and his left kidney to fund special treatment from Master Yao, a member of the outlawed Falun Gong sect. But during a government crackdown, the Master is arrested and Dai Wei's mother - who has fallen in love with him - loses her mind.The millennium draws near and Dai Wei has been in a coma for almost a decade. A sparrow flies through the window and lands on his naked chest; it is a sign that Dai Wei must emerge from his dry cocoon. But China has also undergone a massive transformation in the time that he has been absent. As he prepares to take leave of his old metal bed, Dai Wei realises that the rich imaginative world afforded to him as a coma patient is a startling contrast with the death-in-life of the world outside.

Meili, a young peasant woman born in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a village school teacher, and a distant descendant of Confucius. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, mother, father and daughter escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life.

A novel about the human cost of China's one-child policy through the lens of one rural family on the run from its reach.

May 1989. tens of thousands of students are camped out in Beijing''s Tiananmen Square. What started as a united protest at the slow pace of political reform has begun to lose direction: people from all over china are joining the demonstration and the students at its heat are confused by the influence the suddenly wield. One of them, Dai Wei, argues with his friends about everything from democracy to the distribution of food to protesters, little knowing that, on June 4, a soldier will shoot a bullet into his head, sending him into a deep coma. Beijing Coma is ma Jian''s masterpiece. Spiked with dark wit, poetic beauty and deep rage, it takes the life (and near death) of one young student to create a dazzling and excoriating novel of China''s recent painful past and uneasy future.

`Believable and brutal, this is Ma Jian's boldest...most elegiac work' FINANCIAL TIMES, BOOK OF THE YEARIn seven dream-like episodes, Ma Jian - the banned Chinese writer hailed as `China's Solzhenitsyn' - charts the psychological disintegration of a government leader in provincial China who is haunted by nightmares of his violent past. A biting dystopian satire, what Ma Jian reveals is a nation blinded by materialism and governed by violence and lies. Blending tragic and absurd reality with myth and fantasy, this is not a portrait of an imagined future, but of China as it is today.

Written in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, this novel is a virtuoso piece of red humour about the absurdities and cruelties of life in modern China.

A Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is walking to a sacred mountain to seek forgiveness for sleeping with his daughter, meets a silversmith who has hung the wind-dried corpse of his lover to the walls of his cave, and hears the story of a young female incarnate lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite. In the thin air of the high plateau, the divide between fact and fiction becomes confused and the man is drawn deep into an alien culture he knew nothing about, and which haunts his dreams. Famously banned in China in 1987, Stick Out Your Tongue, is the book that set Ma Jian on the road to exile, and still makes it difficult for him to publish his work in China today. Written shortly after the journey to Tibet he describes so vividly in his prize-winnning travel memoir Red Dust, it is an extraordinary collection of stories about an extraordinary place - a picture of Tibet that is both enchanting and horrifying, violent and beautiful, perverse and seductive. Ma Jian has written a new afterword for the book that explains it''s title (it is what a doctor says to an ill patient when looking for a diagnosis) how it came to be written and something about the complex relationship between China and Tibet. This is the first publication in English of an important work of Chinese literature that has had a huge influence on other writers.

''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 overwhelmed by the desire to escape the confines of his life in Beijing. All around him, China was changing. Deng Xiaoping was introducing economic reform but clamping down on ''Spiritual Pollution' young people were rebelling. With his long hair, denim jeans and artistic friends, Ma Jian was under surveillance from his work unit and the police. His ex-wife was seeking custody of their daughter; his girlfriend was sleeping with another man; and he could no longer find the inspiration to write or paint. One day he bought a train ticket to the westernmost border of China and set off in search of himself. Ma Jian''s journey would last three years and take him to deserts and overpopulated cities, from scenes of barbarity to havens of tranquillity and beauty. The result is an utterly unique book: an insight into the teeming contradictions of China that only a man who was both an insider and an outsider in his own country could have written.

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 life to the revolutionary cause. This is not the novel he wants to write, he tells his friend. Inside his head lives an unwritten book about the people he knows or sees everyday on the streets - people who lives are far more representative of the world in which he lives-

One of Chinas greatest living novelists GuardianBlending fact with fiction, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. After decades of loyal service, Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with promoting President Xi Jinpings China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a microchip that will be implanted into the brain of every citizen to replace all painful recollections with a collective dream of national supremacy, his sanity begins to unravel. Plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, his nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future. This darkly comic fable is a dystopian vision of repression and state-enforced amnesia set not in the future, but in China today. ExcoriatingNot for nothing has Ma been called both the Orwell and Solzhenitsyn of Chinese literature A Financial Times Book of the YearRed Guards meet Kurt Vonnegot, sort of: powerful! Margaret Atwood, via Twitter

«Le rôle de l’écrivain consiste à sonder les ténèbres et par-dessus tout à dire la vérité. J’ai écrit ce roman motivé par ma colère contre les fausses utopies qui asservissent et infantilisent la Chi

Jeune paysanne née au coeur de la Chine rurale, Meili est mariée à Kongzi, l’instituteur du village, lointain descendant de Confucius. Ensemble, ils ont une fille, mais Kongzi, qui veut à tout prix u

Victime de la répression menée par les autorités chinoises sur les artistes dans les années 1980, Ma Jian a trente ans quand il décide de quitter Beijing. Au cours d’un périple de trois ans, il décou

REPUBLISHED ON THE 30th ANNIVERSARY OF THE TIANANMEN MASSACRE, WITH A NEW AFTERWORD FROM THE AUTHOR AND A NEW COVER BY AI WEIWEIBeijing Coma is Ma Jians masterpiece. Spiked with dark wit, poetic beauty and deep rage, it takes the life, and near-death, of one young student to create a dazzling and excoriating novel about contemporary ChinaMonumental GuardianA landmark work of fiction Daily TelegraphA modern literary masterpiece Sunday ExpressDai Wei lies in his bedroom, a prisoner in his body, after he was shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest ten years earlier and left in a coma. As his mother tends to him, and his friends bring news of their lives in an almost unrecognisable China, Dai Wei escapes into his memories, weaving together the events that took him from his harsh childhood in the last years of the Cultural Revolution to his student days at Beijing University.As the minute-by-minute chronicling of the lead-up to his shooting becomes ever more intense, the reader is caught in a gripping, emotional journey where the boundaries between life and death are increasingly blurred.Beijing Coma is one of the finest and most important novels to have been written in this century Chris Patten

Meili, a young peasant woman born in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a village school teacher, and a distant descendant of Confucius. They have a daughter, but desperate for a son to carry on his illustrious family line, Kongzi gets Meili pregnant again without waiting for official permission. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, mother, father and daughter escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life. For years they drift south through the poisoned waterways and ruined landscapes of China, picking up work as they go along, scavenging for necessities and flying from police detection. As Meilis body continues to be invaded by her husband and assaulted by the state, she fights to regain control of her fate and that of her unborn child.