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Multi-prizewinning and internationally bestselling Yan Lianke -- ´one of China´s greatest living authors´ (Guardian) -- returns with an unforgettable tale of three families competing to convert their small town into a super-metropolis

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LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2017

With the Yi River on one side and the Balou Mountains on the other, the village of Explosion was founded a thousand years ago by refugees fleeing a volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era, the name takes on a new significance as the rural community grows explosively from a small village to a town to a city to a vast megalopolis.

Behind this rapid expansion are three rival clans linked together by a web of ambition, madness and greed. Together they transform their hometown into a Babylon of modern times -- an unrivalled urban superpower built on lies, sex and thievery.

´One of the masters of modern Chinese literature´ Jung Chang

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"Charting the transformation of a rural village into a 21st- century megalopolis, it is a boisterously inventive novel that conveys the everyday reality of modern China" David Mills Sunday Times Books of the Year

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Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. He is the author of numerous novels and short-story collections, including Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, Lenin´s Kisses, The Four Books and The Explosion Chronicles. He has been awarded the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize, the Lao She Literary Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award and the Franz Kafka Prize. He has also been shortlisted for an array of prizes including the International Man Booker Prize, the Principe de Asturias Prize for Letters, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the FT/Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices Award and the Prix Femina Etranger. The Day the Sun Died won the Dream of the Red Chamber Award for the World´s Most Distinguished Novel in Chinese. He lives and writes in Beijing.

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