Big Breasts and Wide Hips

About

Mother Shangguan bears eight daughters and one son across the bloodiest decades of twentieth-century China — Japanese invasion, civil war, the Cultural Revolution, and the dizzying market reforms that followed. Each daughter attaches herself to a different faction, ideology, or man, while Jintong, the coddled only son, fails spectacularly at every version of manhood his era offers him. Mo Yan's most ambitious novel uses the Shangguan family as a lens for the entire century, told through bodies — birth, hunger, desire, and the sheer biological persistence of women who survive what history throws at them. Epic, raucous, and deliberately excessive, this is a novel that insists the story of modern China is written on and through the female body.