The Seventh Day
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
From one of the country's most acclaimed writers, a major new novel that depicts the joys and sorrows of modern China.
Yang Fei was born on a moving train, lost by his mother, adopted by a young railway worker, raised with simplicity and love—utterly unprepared for the changes that await him and his country.
As a young man, he searches for a place to belong in a nation ceaselessly reinventing itself.
At forty-one, he meets an unceremonious death, and lacking the money for a burial plot, must roam the afterworld aimlessly.
There, over the course of seven days, he encounters the souls of people he's lost, and as he retraces the path of his life, we meet an extraordinary cast of characters: his adoptive father, beautiful ex-wife, neighbours who perished in the demolition of their homes.
Vivid, urgent and panoramic, Yang Fei's passage movingly traces the contours of his vast nation - its absurdities, its sorrows and its soul.
This searing novel affirms Yu Hua's place as the standard-bearer of Chinese fiction.
A former dentist, now a bestselling writer in Asia, Yu Hua is the acclaimed author of five novels, six story collections and four essay collections. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He has received many awards, including the James Joyce Award, France's Prix Courrier International, and Italy's Premio Grinzane Cavour. Yu Hua lives in Beijing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I roamed on the borderline between life and death." Yang Fei is late for his cremation. His soul won't be laid to rest until he appears for his appointment with the incinerator. Hua's (Boy in the Twilight) eighth book follows 41-year-old Yang Fei's week of wandering in the afterworld in a powerful testament to alienation that stretches beyond the land of the living. Yang Fei drifts through the afterworld and pieces together how he lost his life and what he lost with it. He visits his ex-wife, who died by suicide after a scandal. He encounters a young woman called Mouse Girl, who killed herself after her boyfriend gave her a fake iPhone and did not answer her angry, melancholic blog tirades. He sees his birth mother, from whom he was separated just after his birth. He searches hardest for his father, a man who raised him alone, forsaking friends, lovers, and the opportunity for a much different life. Hua's prose has a lilting, elegiac quality that is both soothing and distant, but his characters, quite like apparitions, never fully materialize.
