China Dream

A biting and humane novel of stunning concision in which buried dreams and past betrayals erupt into the present moment; a feverish and darkly funny vision of contemporary Chinese societyBleakly funny, incisive, stinging and - in its most destabilising passages - gut-wrenching, CHINA DREAM, brilliantly translated by Flora Drew, is set at a time when reality and dystopia have begun to bleed into one another. 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the 50th anniversary of the cultural revolution, and the author intended his novel's publication to time in direct juxtaposition to those two important anniversariesFor more than thirty years, Ma Jian (often a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, although a writer who has yet to break out to American readers) has written in his native Chinese but has seen every one of his books banned in China. In his latest novel, CHINA DREAM, he uses humor, satire, and pointed observations to point out the erosions of freedoms in modern day China. Already a much-anticipated novel after the author's recent tumultuous appearance at a Hong Kong literary festival, CHINA DREAM will be published in the US at a time when Olga Tokarczuk's FLIGHTS and FEVER DREAM by Samanta Schweblin have proven how enthusiastic readers are for electric literary fiction in translation. UK edition named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Financial Times The cover is an original piece of art by acclaimed Chinese contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei, who created it specifically for the novel