The Day the Sun Died

‘I can think of few better novelists than Yan, with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth’ * New York Times Book Review *
‘This exuberant but sinister fable confirms its author as one of China’s most audacious and enigmatic novelists.’ * Economist *
Yan Lianke is one of the best contemporary Chinese writers.’
* Independent *
‘A master of imaginative satire. His work is animated by an affectionate loyalty to his peasant origins in the poverty-stricken province of Henan, and fierce anger over the political abuses of the regime.’ * Guardian *
‘Yan Lianke well deserves to be in the Pantheon of great writers. He has no equal at attacking societal issues or the great Maoist myths in order to turn them into novels so breathtakingly powerful, shot through with black, often desperate, humor.’ * Le Monde Diplomatique *
‘A powerful, captivating work of art.’ * South China Morning Post *
‘This exuberant but sinister fable confirms its author as one of China’s most audacious and enigmatic novelists.’ * Economist *
‘[Yan Lianke’s] confronting, multi-layered novel is hauntingly beautiful.’ * Otago Daily Times *
‘Deeply satirical, darkly angry, full of disgust for his country’s ruling party and politics, Yan Lianke’s latest is surreal and bizarre, a compelling lecture on the moral degradation he sees in his homeland…Lianke has created a brilliant picture of a country heading into chaos.’ * SA Weekend *
‘Yan’s fable, joining a long lineage of so-called “records of anomalies” in Chinese literature, forces readers to reflect on the side of the world that is “too absurd, too cruel and too unpleasant.” This makes “The Day the Sun Died” a relentless and even brutal experience. Yet its description of a society seized by its worst impulses, enacting the repressed hatreds and nightmarish obsessions of its inhabitants, felt more familiar the more I considered it. Yan’s subject is China, but he has condensed the human forces driving today’s global upheavals into a bracing, universal vision.’ * New York Times *
‘The Day the Sun Died bears the largesse and cadence of myth, but it is also the story of a family, told by a simple boy of fourteen. Yan’s physical descriptions can be rich and specific, grounded in realism, but also far-fetched and steeped in surprising metaphor.’ * Ploughshares *
‘Yan has conjured up something both ghastly and unreal, yet only liminally unreal, something that could possibly be real…The writing and translation are both excellent.’ * Full Stop *
‘Effortlessly blending metaphor and allegory, symbolism and satire, Yan has crafted a distinct literary work of dystopian satire, a blend of bruising bureaucratic critique with a sly postmodern pastiche of realism, absurdism and the grotesque…The novel is a tour de force of language control. Rojas has honored all of Yan’s vertiginous syntax, with its switchbacks and echoes, its rhythms and recursions, inducing a spell like a hypnotist’s watch swinging back and forth, lowering our defenses against its control.’ * LA Times *

Yan Lianke is the author of works including Dream of Ding Village, The Day the Sun Died, The Four Books, Three Brothers, and Hard Like Water. He has been awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Royal Society of Literature International Writer Lifetime Award, and was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. He has received two of China’s most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award. He was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China.

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