Serve the People!

‘Serve the People! is a great opportunity to dip your head into a very different cultural space. It’s sharp, fresh, sexy, funny and highly recommended.’ * Sydney Morning Herald *
‘Censorship guaranteed its popularity, though it shouldn’t obscure the book’s talents…a witty and subversive erotic satire.’ * Age *
‘Yan is a poetic and passionate writer, and even his skewering of the idiocies and hypocrisies of the Great Revolution, although surgically precise, are witty and lighthearted. His novel can be read in one sitting and in fact the story is so entertaining, and so deftly told, that it is difficult not to do so.’ * Courier Mail *
‘A very funny, sexy, satire.’ * Independent on Sunday *
‘Yan Lianke’s slim novel drips with the kind of satire that can only come from deep within the machinery of Chinese communism.’ * Financial Times *
‘Part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. It lets the reader see—or rather, intuit—what jokes Chinese officials don’t consider funny. Yan Lianke builds his story speedily and sparely…his story is memorable and strange.’ * New York Times *
‘Serve the People! is a wonderfully biting satire, brimming with absurdity, humor and wit…the novel is exuberantly drawn in several shades of revolutionary (or should that be Revlon?) red.’ * LA Times *

Yan Lianke has been called a ‘master of imaginative satire’ and named ‘one of China’s most successful fiction writers’ by the New York Times. His satirical stories with often sensitive subjects have led to the banning of some of his works, including his novella Serve the People and the novel Dream of Ding Village. Yan’s surrealist writing oscillates between military themes and the Chinese countryside, which lend the often absurdly miserable living conditions of rural life an equally surreal setting.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.