A fascinating collection of vignettes based on the author’s life in China during the Cultural Revolution. Revisiting his experiences as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside, Zou captures a side of the Cultural Revolution that is seldom talked about - the sheer tedium and waste of young life under the regime, as well as the gallows humour that accompanies such desperate situations.
Zou Jingzhi is highly regarded in China as a fiction writer, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright.
Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright, literary translator and former International Booker Prize judge.
"A kaleidoscopic and understated collection of interlocking tales of life in an apartment building under the Cultural Revolution – the daily tedium of its inhabitants, lit by brief and tenuous moments of shared humanity." — The International Booker Prize 2023 panel of judges
