Big Breasts and Wide Hips

About Big Breasts and Wide Hips

A towering work of fiction by the author of Red Sorghum

 

In 1900, as the Boxer Rebellion rages in China, baby Shanggüan Lu is hidden in a flour vat while her parents are slain by invading German forces.

 

Ninety-three years later, having survived the Japanese occupation, the civil war, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, she dies in the care of her only son, a boy addicted to his mother's milk.

 

The story of an indestructible woman in a land brought to its knees by waves of war, famine and communism, by weak men, bandits and bureaucrats, philandering missionaries and hen-murdering midwives, Big Breasts and Wide Hips is a searing, satirical vision of China in the twentieth century.

 

Resplendently grotesque, bristling with grim humour, exhuberant in its treatment of sex, violence, politics and death, it confirms Mo Yan as the greatest Chinese author of his generation.

 

The Author

Mo Yan

Mo Yan was born to a peasant family in Shandong, China in 1955. In 1976 he joined the army and it was here that he was educated, first as a librarian, and later at the Army Arts and Literature College. He is still a staff officer in the People's Liberation Army. Despite the audacity of his writing, he has won virtually every national literary prize. 

Reviews

 

'Astonishing novel. Blending bawdy humour, gory violence and pungent imagery, Mo Yan paints a unique portrait of China's 20th century'

 

 

The Guardian

'Yan manages his blend of mayhem and mysticism with a priestly flair and, despite the terrible bloodshed, the human spirit does endure'

 

 

The Observer

'Fiction in the grand, triple-decker tradition, Dickens gone to China and finding as much human raw material as England ever offered'

 

 

The Washington Post

'Hugely satisfying ... The prose is often brutal but it's frequently beautiful enough to make you stop and read entire pages again'

 

The Good Book Guide

'A novel with an undeniably big heart'

 

 

Scotland on Sunday

'Mo Yan's Northeast Gaomi County ... is as vivid a spot on the literary landscape as William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha or Thomas Hardy's Wessex'

 

Time