Frog

Description

Before the Cultural Revolution, narrator Tadpole's feisty Aunt Gugu is revered as an obstetrician in her home township in rural China. Renowned for her sure hands and uncanny ability to calm anxious mothers, Gugu speeds around town on her bicycle to usher thousands of babies into life. When famine lifts and the population booms, Gugu becomes the unlikely yet passionate enforcer of China's new family-planning policy. She is unrelenting in her mission, invoking hatred in her wake. In her dramatic fall from deity to demon, she becomes the living incarnation of a reviled social policy violently at odds with deep-rooted cultural values. As China moves towards the millennium, a new breed of entrepreneur emerges with a perverse interpretation of the decades-old law. Tadpole finds himself again caught up in the one-child policy and its unpredictable repercussions on the human price of capital. Frog is an extraordinary and riveting mix of the real and the absurd, the comic and the tragic. It presents a searing portrait of China's recent history, in Mo Yan's unique and luminous prose. Translated from the original Chinese edition by Howard Goldblatt 'One of China's leading writers ...his work rings with refreshing authenticity.
' Time 'His idiom has the spiralling invention and mytho-maniacal quality of much world literature of a high order, from Vargas Llosa to Rushdie.' The Observer 'Harrowing, haunting, poignant ...Mo Yan proves himself a novelist of the highest calibre.' Financial Times 'Heavy with symbolism and regret ...both heartbreaking and absurd.' Adelaide Advertiser

Author description

Mo Yan was born in 1955 in Gaomi County in Shandong province, China. He is the author of various novellas and short stories and numerous novels including Red Sorghum, The Republic of Wine, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and The Garlic Ballads. In 2012 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.