Publisher's Synopsis
"There is perhaps no voice better suited to tell
the stories of contemporary China's conflicted, layered reality. China is at
once a very young and a very old country, and as much guided by revolutionary
fervor as by the heavy memories of history. Where the techniques of literary
realism often seem powerless before the many contradictions of the country's
headlong plunge into uneven development, Xia Jia has discovered a way to use
speculative fiction, with its rich semantic web of fantastic metaphors, derived
from both the language of magic and science, to convey the psychological truth
of being Chinese at this moment."-Ken Liu, from the
Introduction
