Mr Muo's Travelling Couch

Wonderful second novel from the author of the best-selling Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

A literary road movie...veers from hilarious to horrific

Allusive, intelligent, and very funny; comedy in the service of entertainment

Memorable and often startlingly beautiful

Unusually for a comic novel, it grips like a thriller and has some page-turningly tense moments... a significant book, as well as an eccentric one

A reading experience that evokes contemporary China with absurdist exactitude

Some of the best passages are, like this, sensuous and plainly descriptive. There is a fantastic mini-essay on the aphrodisiac qualities of the sea cucumber

Well-crafted, often hilarious and surreal

An amusing, charming read with a satirical edge

Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is a film maker and novelist, who left China in 1984 for France where he now lives and works. He is the author of Once on a Moonless Night and the international bestseller, Balzac and the Chinese Seamstress (shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize), which he made into a film.

Dai Sijie's bestselling and much loved first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, was a delightful fable. His second is a Chinese Don Quixote following the peripatetic misadventures of Mr Muo, China's first psychoanalyst. 
 
It's been over ten years since Muo left China. He's been happily studying Freud in France since then. But when he hears that his first love has been thrown into a Chinese jail he rushes home to rescue her. Muo tries to bribe Judge Di but, sick of cash and cars, the judge demands that he find him a virgin to deflower instead. And so Muo embarks on a hilarious quest... 
 
Witty, surreal, moving, wonderfully picaresque, it is packed full of stories, anecdote, incident and mishap, all resulting in a highly enjoyable satire of one innocent man's attempt to negotiate the mind-boggling maze of modern China. 
 
Winner of the Prix Femina.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Here is one of those rare novels, so captivatingly original, so absurdly funny, surprising and moving, that it crosses all boundaries.

A completely beguiling novel. always giving the reader a sense of being there. Very engaging

Wholly delightful, intelligent, funny and unexpected. A remarkable book, offering sheer delight

A simple story, seductively told, it touches and lifts up the beauty of human experience far beyond the mountains of Western China in which the story is set

If you read only one novel, choose this one: it's worth a hundred

An enchanting tale from a pernicious period in Chinese history. Sijie has written a jewel of world literature

If you don't read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, then I'm wasting my time.

Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is a film maker and novelist, who left China in 1984 for France where he now lives and works. He is the author of the international bestseller, Balzac and the Chinese Seamstress (shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize) - which he made into a film - Mr Muo's Travelling Couch (winner of the Prix Femina) and Once on a Moonless Night.

1971: Mao's cultural Revolution is at its peak. Two sons of doctors, sent to 're-education' camps, forced to carry buckets of excrement up and down mountain paths, have only their sense of humour to keep them going. Although the attractive daughter of the local tailor also helps to distract them from the task at hand. 
 
The boys' true re-education starts, however, when they discover a hidden suitcase packed with the great Western novels of the nineteenth century. Their lives are transformed. And not only their lives: after listening to the stories of Balzac, the little seamstress will never be the same again.

Dai Sijie

Adriana Hunter

Dai Sijie is a wonderful storyteller... [It is] so well done, in such a swift and uncompromising way, that the reader and author and characters feel the simple astonishment of having survived ... the end of the tale is beautifully conclusive and satisfactory

This shy, complex novel, which speaks its concerns so quietly, remains a forceful lament, infused with incident and dramatic storytelling

It exercises a subtle and persuasive charm... Its evocation of the distant world of devoted Chinese scholarship and dying artistry is lovingly and enchantingly done

Evokes the past with all the eerie clarity of a dream, its outlines blurred but every tiny, telling detail extraordinarily alive. Anyone in search of a brief history of China would do well to begin right here

Sijie has produced another cunning literary confection, blending history, romance, a long-lost manuscript and the magic of the Orient... Sijie can still draw readers into his elegant web

A young woman hears the tale of a sacred text, written in an ancient language and inscribed on silk cloth many centuries ago. Puyi, the last emperor and owner of the relic, allegedly tore the silk in pieces with his teeth and threw it from a plane when he was taken by the Japanese to Manchuria. A search for this lost text and its poignant, devastatingly simple message begins... 
 
This is a beguiling tale of fables, stories within stories, a young man's desperate search for his father's legacy and a young woman's search for the man she loved. Covering almost a century of China's history, this haunting novel combines mystery, harsh reality and tenderness with astonishing insight.

Dai Sijie

Praise for Once on a Moonless Night

Dai Sijie is a wonderful storyteller... [It is] so well done, in such a swift and uncompromising way, that the reader and author and characters feel the simple astonishment of having survived ... the end of the tale ...

This shy, complex novel, which speaks its concerns so quietly, remains a forceful lament, infused with incident and dramatic storytelling

It exercises a subtle and persuasive charm... Its evocation of the distant world of devoted Chinese scholarship and dying artistry is lovingly and enchantingly done

Dai Sijie is a wonderful storyteller... [It is] so well done, in such a swift and uncompromising way, that the reader and author and characters feel the simple astonishment of having survived ... the end of the tale ...

This shy, complex novel, which speaks its concerns so quietly, remains a forceful lament, infused with incident and dramatic storytelling

It exercises a subtle and persuasive charm... Its evocation of the distant world of devoted Chinese scholarship and dying artistry is lovingly and enchantingly done

Dai Sijie is a wonderful storyteller... [It is] so well done, in such a swift and uncompromising way, that the reader and author and characters feel the simple astonishment of having survived ... the end of the tale ...

This shy, complex novel, which speaks its concerns so quietly, remains a forceful lament, infused with incident and dramatic storytelling

It exercises a subtle and persuasive charm... Its evocation of the distant world of devoted Chinese scholarship and dying artistry is lovingly and enchantingly done

Books by Dai Sijie

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