The Family Plot

A son who wants to kill his father. A father who wants to kill his wife. A wife who wants to kill her only son: this eye-popping new novel by one of the world’s great literary satirists is full of shocking truths.

In Gaotian Town, Central Plains, China, a family lives in abject poverty. The son dreams of going to America, while his father fantasises about building a new house. His long-suffering mother worries about her only child’s waywardness.

All of them want to kill each other.

Class tensions run high in Gaotian Town. Mr and Mrs Home Appliances are the wealthiest and most envied family in town; Shampoo Girl, working at the local beauty parlour, longs to escape; and Boss Veg, a vegetable-seller turned successful entrepreneur, has an unwitting hand in the fate of multiple lives.

Set in a time of turbulent change, The Family Plot is a fable about the price of desperation and desire. With his dark humour Yan Lianke explores inequality, modernity, domestic strife and the decay of tradition—and how far people will go in the quest for a better life.

‘Yan’s storytelling has a luminous, irrepressible quality.’ NPR

‘One of China’s most successful fiction writers.’ The New York Times

‘One of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures.’ Washington Post

‘China’s most controversial novelist.’ New Yorker