Serve the People!

The erotic masterpiece banned in China.

A model student in his regiment, Wu Dawang can recite tracts of Mao's writings and prepare ten courses of food in record time. He wants nothing more than to earn promotion & serve the people, working as hard as he can in the commander's home. But the latter's bored wife, Liu Lian, has other ideas of how Wu Dawang can serve the people-in her bedroom.

Forgetting the battles of the People's Liberation Army, mistress and servant engage in an extended erotic adventure. The more they defile the symbols of Mao's cultural revolution, the better their sex. Together they smash statues of Mao, tear up The Little Red Book & urinate on his epigrams.

The passions of a peasant soldier & his mistress subvert sexual, political & revolutionary taboos. Serve the People! is at once a deliciously comic satire, & a masterpiece of profound pathos by one of China's greatest living writers.

'Deconstructs Maoism with the Orwellian gusto of...

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Yan Lianke is the author of the memoir Three Brothers & numerous novels & novellas, including Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, The Four Books, Lenin’s Kisses, Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, & The Years, Months, Days. He was awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature & the Franz Kafka Prize. He was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, & he has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, & the Prix Femina Étranger. He has also received 2 of China’s most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize & the Lao She Award.

Julia Lovell is Professor of Modern China at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of The Great Wall & The Opium War, which won the 2012 Jan Michalski Prize. Her many translations of modern Chinese fiction into Englishinclude The Real Story of Ah Q & Other Tales of China.