Before the Cultural Revolution, Gugu, narrator Tadpole’s feisty aunt, is a respected midwife in her rural community. She combines modern medical knowledge with a healer's touch to save the lives of village women and their babies. Gugu is beautiful, charismatic, and of an unimpeachable political background.

After a disastrous love affair with a defector leaves Gugu reeling, she throws herself zealously into enforcing China's draconian new family planning policy by any means necessary, be it forced sterilizations or late-term abortions. Tragically, her blind devotion to the Party line spares no one, not her own family, not even herself.

Once beloved, Gugu becomes the living incarnation of a reviled social policy violently at odds with deeply rooted social values. Spanning the pre-revolutionary era and the country's modern day consumer society, Mo Yan's tatut and engrossing examination of Chinese society will be read for generations to come.


About the Author:

Mo Yan (literally "don't speak") is the pen name of Guan Moye. Born in 1955 to a peasant family in Shandong province, he is the author of ten novels, including Red Sorgum, which was made into a feature film; dozens of novellas; and hundreds of short stories. Mo Yan is the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. He has won virtually every Chinese literary prize, including the Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2011 (China's most prestigious literary award), and is the most critically acclaimed Chinese writer of his generation, in both China and around the world. He lives in Beijing.


About the Translator:

Howard Goldblatt, widely recognized as one of the best translators from Chinese to English, has received the National Translation Award as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work. He lives in Colorado.