Autorentext

Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. He is the author of numerous novels and short-story collections, including Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, Lenin's Kisses, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles, The Day the Sun Died and Hard Like Water. He has been awarded the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize, the Lao She Literary Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award and the Franz Kafka Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize, the Principe de Asturias Prize for Letters, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the FT/Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices Award and the prix Femina Étranger. The Day the Sun Died won the Dream of the Red Chamber Award for the World's Most Distinguished Novel in Chinese. He lives and writes in Beijing.

Klappentext

A son who wants to kill his father. A father who wants to kill his wife. A wife who wants to kill her only son: this eye-popping new novel by one of the world's great literary satirists is full of surprises and home truths.

In Gaotian Town, Central Plains, China, a family lives in abject poverty. The son dreams of going to America, while his father fantasises about building a new house. His long-suffering mother worries about her only child's waywardness.

All of them want to kill each other.

Class tensions run high in Gaotian Town, from the wealthiest and most envied family in town to the girl working at the beauty parlour who longs to escape, and the entrepreneurial grocer whose success has consequences for multiple lives.

Set in a time of turbulent change, The Family Plot reveals the family's slow descent into murderous chaos, in a fable about the price of desperation and desire. With his dark humour Yan Lianke explores inequality, modernity, domestic strife and the decay of tradition-and how far people will go in the quest for a better life.