The Four Books

About

In the ninety-ninth district of a vast labor camp during the Great Leap Forward, intellectuals have been sent for re-education. They are overseen by a young man called the Child, who rewards good behavior with stars and punishes dissent with exile. The prisoners — the Author, the Musician, the Scholar, the Theologian — navigate survival by performing compliance while the famine outside the camp walls grows. Yan Lianke structures his novel as four overlapping texts, each telling the same events from a different angle and in a different literary mode — myth, realism, satire, scripture. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait of one of China's darkest chapters, told by a writer whose books are banned in his own country. A novel about a system that demands people become children again — and the terrifying ease with which they comply.