This month book:

Peach Blossom Paradise by Ge Fei

An enthralling story of revolution, idealism, and a savage struggle for utopia by one of China’s greatest living novelists. Peach Blossom Paradise is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his pocket turns up at his estate and is inexplicably welcomed as a relative. This mysterious man has a great vision of reforging China as an egalitarian utopia, and he will stop at nothing to make it real. It is his own plans, however, which come to nothing, and his “little sister” Xiumi is left to take up arms against a Confucian world in which women are chattel. Her campaign for change and her struggle to seize control over her own body are continually threatened by the violent whims of men who claim to be building paradise. About the author:  Ge Fei is the pen name of Liu Yong, who was born in Jiangsu Province in 1964. His scholarly publications include Kafka’s Pendulum and his fiction includes The Invisibility Cloak (available as an NYRB Classic); the Jiangnan Trilogy, of which Peach Blossom Paradise is the first volume; and the novella Flock of Brown Birds. He was awarded the 2014 Lu Xun Literary Prize and the 2015 Mao Dun Prize for Fiction.