Hard Like Water

About

Two young revolutionaries meet during the Cultural Revolution and fall passionately in love — with each other and with Mao's vision of a new China. Their affair is explosive, their political ambition boundless, and their rise to power in their small town both exhilarating and terrifying. Then the revolution, like all revolutions, begins to eat its own. Yan Lianke, called "China's most controversial novelist" by The New Yorker, writes political satire with the energy of a picaresque adventure. His protagonists are simultaneously ridiculous and sympathetic — true believers whose sincerity makes their corruption all the more devastating. The prose swings between revolutionary rhetoric and physical desire with dizzying momentum. A love story wrapped in a political satire wrapped in a tragedy — about the intoxication of belief and the hangover that follows.