The Explosion Chronicles

Yan Lianke

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Nominee:International Booker Prize -Novel (2017)

Yan Lianke is one of the most acclaimed writers of contemporary China--twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, as well as the winner of the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize--and he has been lauded for his imaginative satire and perceptive cultural critique. The Explosion Chronicles tells the unforgettable tale of rival families competing in a greed-fueled race to convert their sleepy, rural community into a thriving super metropolis.

With the Yi River on one side and the Balou Mountains on the other, the remote village of Explosion was founded more than a millennium ago by refugees fleeing a seismic volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era, the name takes on surprising significance as the villagers aspire to transform their poor province into a bustling city of millions.

Behind this explosive expansion are the four Kong brothers, whose loyalty is tested when they set out to fulfill their individual destinies; Zhu Ying, a wealthy businesswoman and the daughter of the former village chief; and Cheng Qing, a secretary climbing the ranks to become an influential political figure. Linked together by a web of lies, vice, and ambition, they are the driving force behind their hometown's transformation. And when Explosion's progress begins to take a lethal toll, they are forced to confront the sacrifices they have made for power and money.

Brimming with absurdity, intelligence, and wit, The Explosion Chronicles is a riotous exploration of the high stakes of unbridled authority, the consequences of corruption, the polarizing dynamics of love and hate, and the seemingly unstoppable excesses of capitalist culture.

Book Details

Publisher: Grove Press
Publish Date: Oct 4th, 2016
Pages: 464
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.90in - 1.70in - 1.45lb
EAN: 9780802125828
Categories: • Literary• Psychological• Cultural Heritage

About the Author

Yan Lianke is the author of numerous short story collections and novels, including The Four Books, Lenin's Kisses, Serve the People!, and Dream of Ding Village. Among many honors, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize as well as two of China's most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun prize and the Lao She award.

Critics’ reviews

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Praise for The Explosion Chronicles

"A rip-roaring Swiftian satire from a contemporary Chinese master . . . Yan Lianke, one of China's most forthright and versatile novelists, enlists extravagant comedy and far-fetched fable to propel his critique of a society where 'power and money have colluded to steal people's souls' . . . The reader slips into a literary China of poetry and mystery that flourished long before the boom." --Economist

"This darkly absurd history trucks freely with the fantastic . . . but many of the more brazen events are taken straight from the news . . . Yan's burlesque of a nation driven insane by money is equally a satire of some of the excesses of the Chinese Revolution." --Wall Street Journal

"A satire of ambition." --Sacramento News

"Yan returns with renewed vigor to the job of lampooning communist orthodoxy, capitalist ambition, and 'contemporary China's incomprehensible absurdity' . . . [The Explosion Chronicles] has the absurdist feel of an Ionesco or Dürrenmatt piece, though without any of the heavy-handed obviousness . . . It can be read as a kind of Swiftian satire . . . Brilliant." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"An epic page-turner . . . a multi-layered marvel . . . combining unflinching observation [and] stinging satire . . . Yan's mesmerizing ability to pull readers into this raw, subversive, not completely fictional world will continue to build his international audiences." --Library Journal (starred review)

"This novel is a thoroughly fantastical satire where the absurdity reflects the profound truth . . . Beautiful and strongly poetic . . . Yan Lianke's ambition is not that of a polemicist, his realist and fantastical approach creates a literary work and make us feel this phenomenal transformation." --Rue 89

"Yan Lianke imagines a parable of the changes he has lived through . . . [He] manipulates irony, absurdity, and the fantastical with ease." --Telerama

"Armed with a literary style called 'mythorealism', which shows an invisible reality via fiction, Yan Lianke paints a metaphoric and absurd portrait of contemporary China so obsessed with growth that its moral values have been left by the wayside. Yan Lianke's poetic prose rewards those who read to the end of this great novel of rare profundity." --Le Monde