In luminous prose, Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of these and other unforgettable characters, including a serious seven-year-old boy, Tong aĬrippled girl named Nini the sinister idler Bashi and Kai, a beautiful radio news announcer who is married to a man from a powerful family. Neither of them imagines that their daughter’s death will have profound and far-reaching effects, in Muddy River and beyond. Shan’s father, Teacher Gu, who has already, in his heart and mind, buried his rebellious daughter, begins to retreat into memories. Her distraught mother, determined to follow the custom of burning her only child’s clothing to ease her journey into the next world, is about to make another bold decision. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent.

A young woman, Gu Shan, a bold spirit and a follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism.

Morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River. In this powerful and beautiful story, we follow a group of people in a small town during this dramatic and harrowing time, the era that was a forebear of the Tiananmen Square uprising. Brilliant and illuminating, this astonishing debut novel by the award-winning writer Yiyun Li is set in China in the late 1970s, when Beijing was rocked by the Democratic Wall Movement, an anti-Communist groundswell designed to move China beyond the dark shadow of the Cultural Revolution toward a more enlightened and open society.

The vagrants by yiyun li