I Did Not Kill My Husband
A Novel
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Li Xuelian, married to Qin Yuhe, is pregnant with their second child. Happy news? Not in China, with its one-child policy. It is a crime. What is she to do? Her only option is divorcing before the second child is born.
“Once the baby has entered into the household registry, we’ll marry again. The baby will be born after the divorce, so we’ll each have one child when we marry again. No law says couples with one child can’t marry.” Perfect! Except that after the divorce, Qin marries . . . another woman who is expecting a baby. Mad with rage, Li runs to the judge begging him to declare the divorce a sham so she may remarry and truly divorce the fool!
Liu’s politically charged plot reads like an absurd and hilarious comedy, softening what moves from a harsh indictment of China’s one-child law to a head-on critique of China’s corrupt system. I Did Not Kill My Husband is storytelling and satire of the highest order, sharp-edged and ironic.
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zhenyun's (Cell Phone) latest novel, an overseas bestseller, is a satirical tale that nimbly examines political corruption in China. When Li Xuelian, married to Qin Yuhe, becomes pregnant with their second child, she finds a curious way to circumnavigate the government's one-child policy. She divorces, has the baby, and then seeks Yuhe out to remarry him; unfortunately, he has found another wife. Furious, she wants to declare the separation a sham so that she can divorce him properly. She seeks redress from local politicians, who spurn her to protect their cushy government jobs. Whether the divorce is real or not, Zhenyun depicts truth as a slippery thing; when Xuelian enters Beijing to protest, she notices the geography of Tiananmen Square is not how it was described to her in school (a nod to the fact she would not have learned about its political significance there, either). Perhaps mindful of such governmental interventions regarding politically inexpedient truths, Zhenyun does not lecture, but instead playfully examines the eccentricities of characters caught up in a farcical web of bribery and shady dealings; his larger meaning is unmistakable.
