Brothers - Yu Hua

From the acclaimed - and controversial - Chinese novelist, Brothers is a big-spirited comedy of society running amok in modern China. When Baldy Li's mother marries Song Gang's father their lives become entangled. Then when both their parents die, Song Gang swears never to forsake his younger brother. In the event, though, both are undone by their love for one woman. Sprawling, rambunctious, energetic and brutal, Brothers is a dizzying rollercoaster ride through life in a newly capitalist world. 'Yu Hua has long been considered one of China's most important novelists' Nell Freudenberger 'This is modern China coming to terms with itself in a mixture of gore, laughter and self-mockery' Independent 'Brothers gives us contemporary China with a picaresque panache that Western critics have been quick to call Rabelaisian, but which is actually Chinese all the way' Financial Times 'Yu Hua effortlessly moves from the grotesque to the tragic and from the ironic to the dramatic . . . There is Hemingway in Yu Hua, certainly, but also Stendhal' Le Monde