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.