The novel opens with Jade Zhao arriving at an airport in the Central State after fifteen years abroad. The world she returns to is shaped by the aftermath of a global pandemic caused by Virus Nexus, which led to sealed borders and the collapse of Western political alliances. At the airport, passengers are separated into […]
Part One: Xiao Sang and Her Friends and Parents The novel opens with Xiao Sang, a reflective young woman, immersed in her diary. She muses about returning to “that time,” a mysterious inner realm where choices might reveal themselves. This sets the stage for the novel’s mixture of reality and dreamlike imagination. Her life revolves […]
The novel The World Around Me traces the life of Zhou Wei from her earliest childhood to her adulthood, embedding her personal experiences within layers of allegory, memory, and symbolic episodes. At its core, it is a story about a girl raised in a fractured family, shaped by abandonment, bitterness, and survival, but told in […]
COCOON is a coming-of-age novel set in the eastern Chinese city of Jinan centering on the lives of two childhood best friends from the post-80’s generation, Li Jiaqi and Cheng Gong, and a dark secret that binds their respective families’ – and their own – destinies. The novel begins as a conversation between the pair […]
A female novelist “specialising in beastly tales” writes a column for the Yong’an paper in which she tells the stories of the different breeds of beasts living in the city alongside humans, often undistinguishable from them. In nine chapters – each of which can be read as a self-contained short story – the protago- nist focusses on a beast of a […]