Brothers

About

When Baldy Li's mother marries Song Gang's father, the two boys become stepbrothers — and Song Gang swears never to forsake his younger brother. It's a promise that holds through the Cultural Revolution, through poverty, through the vertigo of China's overnight transformation into a capitalist free-for-all. Then both men fall in love with the same woman, and the promise that defined their lives becomes the thing that destroys them. Yu Hua's epic is rambunctious, brutal, and frequently hilarious — a picaresque that covers decades of Chinese history at the speed of a man running downhill. The tonal range is staggering: slapstick and tragedy occupy the same paragraph without contradiction. Brothers is a novel about what happens to loyalty when an entire country decides to reinvent itself overnight — and takes no prisoners.