Strange Beasts of China

About

In the city of Yong'an, humans live alongside mysterious beast species — sorrowful beasts, sacrificial beasts, impasse beasts — each with their own biology, customs, and uneasy relationship with the human population. A young cryptozoologist investigates these creatures for a newspaper column, but her research keeps pulling her closer to truths about her own origins. Yan Ge has built something genuinely strange here: part urban fantasy bestiary, part noir, part meditation on what it means to classify the living world into categories of "us" and "them." Each chapter introduces a new species and a new way of asking who gets to be considered fully human. A novel that uses its invented creatures to illuminate the real ones — and the borders we draw between them.