The Chilli Bean Paste Clan

About

In a fictional town in western China, the Duan-Xue family presides over a lucrative chilli bean paste factory and the complicated loyalties that come with it. As Gran's eightieth birthday approaches, the family gathers — and a secret about the youngest son's parentage threatens to blow the whole dynasty apart. What follows is a darkly comic family saga where business, blood, and bean paste are impossible to separate. Yan Ge writes the family as an economic unit held together by appetite and obligation rather than love, though love keeps showing up uninvited. The novel is funny, messy, and populated by characters who are simultaneously infuriating and impossible not to care about. A family drama seasoned with the thing that made them — and might be the thing that tears them apart.