Yan Lianke Books in Order

Two novellas explore survival under extreme hardship: a widow seeks a disturbing cure for her disabled children, while an elderly man and a blind dog remain in a drought-stricken village to protect a single crop.

After a summer snowstorm destroys their livelihood, villagers accept an official’s plan to form a traveling performance troupe. He intends to use the profits to buy Lenin’s corpse, turning their misfortune into an ambitious tourism scheme.

A Chinese village’s blood-selling business brings wealth to some and a devastating HIV epidemic to others. One family’s suffering exposes the corruption and opportunism that flourish as the community struggles with illness, blame and loss.

In Cultural Revolution China, a commander’s young wife begins an affair with the soldier assigned to her household. Their private rebellion entwines sexual desire with political taboos, putting both lovers at risk within a rigid hierarchy.

Yan Lianke explores how fiction conveys truth through different forms of realism. Reading writers from Tolstoy to Kafka and García Márquez, he explains his own use of myths, allegories and dreams to represent hidden realities.

The village of Explosion grows into a vast Chinese metropolis through the ambitions of rival families. Their shifting alliances, betrayals and desires drive its expansion while exposing the human consequences of corruption and the pursuit of wealth.

Artists and intellectuals imprisoned in a reeducation camp compete for rewards and the possibility of freedom. Impossible production quotas and gathering famine destroy its fragile order, leaving the detainees to confront survival, betrayal and belief.

Fourteen-year-old Li Niannian notices his village’s residents carrying on their lives while asleep. As their suppressed desires emerge and dreamwalking spreads, he and his funeral-director parents must find a way to save their community before dawn.

Yan Lianke recalls his father, uncles and childhood in rural China during the Cultural Revolution. Poverty, exhausting labor and dreams of becoming a writer shape a memoir about family bonds, escape and the costs of leaving home.

Two married villagers begin a secret affair while embracing the Cultural Revolution with fervor. Their campaigns to transform a traditional community mingle political ambition with forbidden desire, threatening their future when their relationship is discovered.

A young Buddhist nun and a Daoist disciple fall in love at a Beijing religious training center. As competitive fundraising exposes institutional corruption, they must decide whether to remain faithful to their calling or pursue secular life together.