Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty as the Chinese battle both the Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s. As the novel opens, a group of villagers, led by Commander Yu, the narrator's grandfather, prepare to attack the advancing Japanese. Yu sends his 14-year-old son back home to get food for his men; but as Yu's wife returns through the sorghum fields with the food, the Japanese start firing and she is killed. Her death becomes the thread that links the past to the present and the narrator moves back and forth recording the war's progress, the fighting between the Chinese warlords and his family's history.

Red Sorghum

Literature & Fiction

YAN, MO

Genre Fiction

Random House]

The author of the critically acclaimed Red Sorghum presents an epic story--banned in his native China--about a group of peasants who challenges the Communist authorities when they are forced to destroy their own crops. Reprint.

GARLIC BALLADS

Contemporary

Pearson

The Republic of Wine

Special Investigator Ding Gou'er is dispatched to the Republic of Wine to investigate rumours of cannibalism. Beginning his mission at the mining company, he soon encounters Diamond Jin whose legendary capacity to hold liqour seems to hide a fondness for darker appetites. Then, at a banquet served in his honour, Ding Gou'er partakes of a dish - the memory of which is confused by an alcoholic fog - he will come to regret eating...In this hypnotic narrative, Mo Yan spins tales of terrible creatures - a dwarf, a scaly demon, a troupe of small boys raised for eating and a cookery teacher who primes her students with monstrous recipes.

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Frog: A Novel

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK From the Nobel-prize winning author of Red Sorghum and one China’s most revered writers, a novel exploring the One-Child Policy Before the Cultural Revolution, Gugu, narrator Tadpole’s feisty aunt, is a respected midwife in her rural community. She combines modern medical knowledge with a healer's touch to save the lives of village women and their babies. Gugu is beautiful, charismatic, and of an unimpeachable political background. After a disastrous love affair with a defector leaves Gugu reeling, she throws herself zealously into enforcing China's draconian new family planning policy by any means necessary, be it forced sterilizations or late-term abortions. Tragically, her blind devotion to the Party line spares no one, not her own family, not even herself. Once beloved, Gugu becomes the living incarnation of a reviled social policy violently at odds with deeply rooted social values. Spanning the pre-revolutionary era and the country's modern day consumer society, Mo Yan's taut and engrossing examination of Chinese society will be read for generations to come.

Literary

Penguin Publishing Group

Frog

Hamish Hamilton

Each of the seven chapters represents a different time period, from the end of the Quing dynasty, up through the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, the civil war, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao years. This novel is the author's vision of the 20th century.

Big Breasts and Wide Hips

METHUEN

Big Breasts, Wide Hips

Methuen Publishing, Ltd.

The farmers of Paradise County have been leading a hardscrabble life unchanged for generations. The Communist government has encouraged them to plant garlic, but selling the crop is not as simple as they believed. Warehouses fill up, taxes skyrocket, and government officials maltreat even those who have traveled for days to sell their harvest. A surplus on the garlic market ensues, and the farmers must watch in horror as their crops wither and rot in the fields. Families are destroyed by the random imprisonment of young and old for supposed crimes against the state. 
The prisoners languish in horrifying conditions in their cells, with only their strength of character and thoughts of their loved ones to save them from madness. Meanwhile, a blind minstrel incites the masses to take the law into their own hands, and a riot of apocalyptic proportions follows with savage and unforgettable consequences. The Garlic Ballads is a powerful vision of life under the heel of an inflexible and uncaring government. It is also a delicate story of love between man and woman, father and child, friend and friend—and the struggle to maintain that love despite overwhelming obstacles.

Garlic Ballads

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP BOOK OF 2015 WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK The author of Red Sorghum and China’s most revered and controversial novelist returns with his first major publication since winning the Nobel PrizeIn 2012, the Nobel committee confirmed Mo Yan’s position as one of the greatest and most important writers of our time. In his much-anticipated new novel, Mo Yan chronicles the sweeping history of modern China through the lens of the nation’s controversial one-child policy.
Frog opens with a playwright nicknamed Tadpole who plans to write about his aunt. In her youth, Gugu—the beautiful daughter of a famous doctor and staunch Communist—is revered for her skill as a midwife. But when her lover defects, Gugu’s own loyalty to the Party is questioned. She decides to prove her allegiance by strictly enforcing the one-child policy, keeping tabs on the number of children in the village, and performing abortions on women as many as eight months pregnant.
In sharply personal prose, Mo Yan depicts a world of desperate families, illegal surrogates, forced abortions, and the guilt of those who must enforce the policy. At once illuminating and devastating, it shines a light into the heart of communist China.

VIKING

A novel of family, myth, and memory set during the fratricidal barbarity of 1930s China follows the Chinese as they battle the Japanese and each other. 10,000 first printing.

Red Sorghum: A Novel of China

Viking Adult

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by YAN, MO. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by YAN, MO

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by YAN, MO. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Red Sorghum

GARLIC BALLADS

The Republic of Wine

Frog: A Novel

Frog

Big Breasts and Wide Hips

Big Breasts, Wide Hips

Garlic Ballads

Frog: A Novel

Red Sorghum: A Novel of China