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The Explosion Chronicles

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9781784701925

  • Length: 480  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 30mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 379g

  • RRP: £9.99

The Explosion Chronicles

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2017

With the Yi River on one side and the Balou Mountains on the other, the village of Explosion was founded a thousand years ago by refugees fleeing a volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era, the name takes on a new significance as the rural community grows explosively from a small village to a town to a city to a vast megalopolis.

Behind this rapid expansion are three rival clans linked together by a web of ambition, madness and greed. Together they transform their hometown into a Babylon of modern times -- an unrivalled urban superpower built on lies, sex and thievery.

'One of the masters of modern Chinese literature' Jung Chang

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9781784701925

  • Length: 480  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 30mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 379g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

  • Charting the transformation of a rural village into a 21st- century megalopolis, it is a boisterously inventive novel that conveys the everyday reality of modern China

    David Mills, Sunday Times Books of the Year

  • As much a parody of communist rule in China as a devastating critique of capitalist excess, power, greed and self-destruction, Yan’s novel is nothing short of a masterpiece

    Claire Kohda Hazelton, Observer

  • Extraordinary... A provocatively illuminating and perceptive insight into contemporary China

    David Mills, The Sunday Times

  • A hyper-real tour de force, a blistering condemnation of political corruption and excess masquerading as absurdist saga

    Catherine Taylor, Financial Times

  • 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 Economist

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About the Author

Yan Lianke

Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. He is the author of numerous novels and short-story collections, including Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, Lenin's Kisses, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles and The Day the Sun Died. He has been awarded the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize, the Lao She Literary Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award and the Franz Kafka Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize, the Principe de Asturias Prize for Letters, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the FT/Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices Award and the prix Femina Étranger. The Day the Sun Died won the Dream of the Red Chamber Award for the World's Most Distinguished Novel in Chinese. He lives and writes in Beijing.

Yan Lianke

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