The Seventh Day

About

Yang Fei is dead. Over seven days, he wanders through the afterlife and encounters other recently deceased people, each carrying the story of how contemporary China killed them — a fire in a restaurant, a forced demolition, a medical scandal, an industrial accident. The dead are more honest than the living, and their testimonies accumulate into a panoramic portrait of a society consuming its own citizens. Yu Hua structures his novel as a ghost story that is also a state-of-the-nation report, using death as the only vantage point from which the full truth of modern Chinese life can be spoken. The tone shifts between savage comedy and genuine tenderness, often in the same sentence. A novel narrated from beyond the grave — because in contemporary China, that's the only place where the whole truth gets told.