The Day the Sun Died

(Paperback)

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Description

A surreal and gripping new book by one of China's most renowned contemporary writers One dusk in early June, in a town deep in the Balou mountains, fourteen-year-old Li Niannian notices something strange about his town. Instead of settling down for the night, the residents start appearing in the streets and fields. There are people everywhere. Li Niannian watches, mystified. But then he realises the people are dreamwalking, carrying on with their daily business as if the sun hadn't gone down. And before too long, as more and more people succumb, in the black of night all hell breaks loose. Set over the course of one night, The Day the Sun Died sets chaos and darkness against the sunny optimism of the 'Chinese dream' promoted by President Xi Jinping. We are thrown into the middle of an increasingly strange and troubling waking nightmare as Li Niannian and his father struggle to save the town, and persuade the sun to rise again.

Reviews

`I can think of few better novelists than Yan, with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth * New York Times Book Review *
`This exuberant but sinister fable confirms its author as one of Chinas most audacious and enigmatic novelists. * Economist *
Yan Lianke is one of the best contemporary Chinese writers.
* Independent *
`A master of imaginative satire. His work is animated by an affectionate loyalty to his peasant origins in the poverty-stricken province of Henan, and fierce anger over the political abuses of the regime. * Guardian *
`Yan Lianke well deserves to be in the Pantheon of great writers. He has no equal at attacking societal issues or the great Maoist myths in order to turn them into novels so breathtakingly powerful, shot through with black, often desperate, humor. * Le Monde Diplomatique *
`A powerful, captivating work of art. * South China Morning Post *
`This exuberant but sinister fable confirms its author as one of Chinas most audacious and enigmatic novelists. * Economist *
`[Yan Liankes] confronting, multi-layered novel is hauntingly beautiful. * Otago Daily Times *
`Deeply satirical, darkly angry, full of disgust for his countrys ruling party and politics, Yan Liankes latest is surreal and bizarre, a compelling lecture on the moral degradation he sees in his homelandLianke has created a brilliant picture of a country heading into chaos. * SA Weekend *
`Yans fable, joining a long lineage of so-called records of anomalies in Chinese literature, forces readers to reflect on the side of the world that is too absurd, too cruel and too unpleasant. This makes The Day the Sun Died a relentless and even brutal experience. Yet its description of a society seized by its worst impulses, enacting the repressed hatreds and nightmarish obsessions of its inhabitants, felt more familiar the more I considered it. Yans subject is China, but he has condensed the human forces driving todays global upheavals into a bracing, universal vision. * New York Times *
`The Day the Sun Died bears the largesse and cadence of myth, but it is also the story of a family, told by a simple boy of fourteen. Yans physical descriptions can be rich and specific, grounded in realism, but also far-fetched and steeped in surprising metaphor. * Ploughshares *
`Yan has conjured up something both ghastly and unreal, yet only liminally unreal, something that could possibly be realThe writing and translation are both excellent. * Full Stop *
'Effortlessly blending metaphor and allegory, symbolism and satire, Yan has crafted a distinct literary work of dystopian satire, a blend of bruising bureaucratic critique with a sly postmodern pastiche of realism, absurdism and the grotesque...The novel is a tour de force of language control. Rojas has honored all of Yans vertiginous syntax, with its switchbacks and echoes, its rhythms and recursions, inducing a spell like a hypnotists watch swinging back and forth, lowering our defenses against its control. * LA Times *

Author Bio

Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. Text has published his novels Serve the People!, Lenin's Kisses, Dream of Ding Village, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles and The Years, Months, Days. Yan Lianke won the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize in 2013. He has also won two of China's most prestigious literary awards- the Lu Xan Prize and the Lao She Award. In 2014, he won the Franz Kafka Prize. He lives in Bejing. Carlos Rojas is Associate Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies and Women's Studies at Duke University. He has translated Yan Lianke's four most recent novels.