The Family Plot

“Yan’s storytelling has a luminous, irrepressible quality.”—NPR

The brilliant and highly resonant new novel from one of China’s most influential and important contemporary writers, exploring a son, father, and mother all consumed by the desire for success, even at the cost of one family member’s life

In Gaotian Town on China’s Central Plains, one perfectly normal working-class family is aspiring to better things. The son dreams of making enough money to go to America, while his father longs to build a new house like his middle-class neighbors, despite lacking the means to do so. His long-suffering wife worries about her only child’s waywardness and feels she must take matters into her own hands. Unbeknownst to one another, each family member is thinking about killing one of the others.

Class tensions run high in the town, from the wealthiest and most envied family to the girl working at the beauty parlour who longs to escape, and the entrepreneurial grocer whose success has consequences for multiple lives. Set against the turbulent backdrop of social and cultural transformation, we witness a community undone by desperation and desire.

Yan Lianke unflinchingly recounts one family’s slow descent into chaos in a darkly comic voice that is his alone. The Family Plot explores the push and pull of money, modernity, familial strife and the decay of tradition—and the lengths to which people will go as they strive for a better life.