The Noodle Maker

(Paperback)

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Description

'Playful and wonderfully dark, The Noodle Maker confirms Ma Jian as a Chinese Kundera. The funniest book I've read in a long time' Philip Marsden Every week, a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood donor meet for dinner. They are unlikely friends - one of them tortured by his 'art', the other fat and wealthy from the earthy business of providing spare blood for the citizens of China. Over the course of one especially gastronomic evening, the writer starts to complain about his latest Party commission- the story of an ordinary soldier who sacrifices his life to the revolutionary cause. This is not the novel he wants to write, he tells his friend. Inside his head lives an unwritten book about the people he knows or sees everyday on the streets - people who lives are far more representative of the world in which he lives...

Reviews

Compelling, inventive and bleakly funny * Big Issue *
Deep black humour...owes a debt to Italo Calvino * Daily Telegraph *
Ma's writing shines a light that is both humane and angry into some of the dustiest corners of a closed and often forgotten society * Observer *
Playful and wonderfully dark...a Chinese Kundera -- Philip Marsden

Author Bio

Ma Jian left Beijing for Hong Kong in 1987, shortly before his books were banned in China. After the hand-over of Hong Kong he moved to Germany and then London, where he now lives. His acclaimed book Red Dust won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2002.