Red Sorghum

About

As Commander Yu leads his villagers against the advancing Japanese in 1930s China, the narrator — his grandson — reconstructs the epic through flashbacks that span three generations of his family. The landscape is one of staggering beauty: red sorghum fields stretching to the horizon. The events that play out within them are of staggering horror: war, famine, banditry, and the fierce, ungovernable passions of people who refuse to be conquered. Mo Yan's breakthrough novel, which helped earn him the Nobel Prize, creates a mythology of rural China as vivid and violent as any epic. The sorghum fields become the stage for a family saga that moves between brutality and tenderness, between history and legend, with the rhythm of oral storytelling. A novel that reads like a myth being born — fierce, beautiful, and soaked in the red of the earth that gave it life.