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• About the Author
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Written by Yu Hua

• Format: Hardcover, 656 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon
• On Sale: January 27, 2009
• Price: $29.95
• ISBN: 978-0-375-42499-1 (0-375-42499-7)

about this book

A bestseller in China, recently short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and a winner of France’s Prix Courrier International, Brothers is an epic and wildly unhinged black comedy of modern Chinese society running amok.

Here is China as we’ve never seen it, in a sweeping, Rabelaisian panorama of forty years of rough-and-rumble Chinese history that has already scandalized millions of readers in the author’s homeland. Yu Hua, award-winning author of To Live, gives us a surreal tale of two brothers riding the dizzying roller coaster of life in a newly capitalist world. As comically mismatched teenagers, Baldy Li, a sex-obsessed ne’er-do-well, and Song Gang, his bookish, sensitive stepbrother, vow that they will always be brothers--a bond they will struggle to maintain over the years as they weather the ups and downs of rivalry in love and making and losing millions in the new China. Their tribulations play out across a richly populated backdrop that is every bit as vibrant: the rapidly-changing village of Liu Town, full of such lively characters as the self-important Poet Zhao, the craven dentist Yanker Yu, the virginal town beauty (turned madam) Lin Hong, and the simpering vendor Popsicle Wang.

With sly and biting humor, combined with an insightful and compassionate eye for the lives of ordinary people, Yu Hua shows how the madness of the Cultural Revolution has transformed into the equally rabid madness of extreme materialism. Both tragic and absurd by turns, Brothers is a monumental spectacle and a fascinating vision of an extraordinary place and time.


“Underneath the stylized dialogue, the extremes of brutality and emotion, and the apparent flatness of the characters, are real people, emerging from a period of horror. They are still people who can’t risk planning very far into the future or thinking very deeply about the past. Everything they have experienced together is compressed in this vital and electric present moment.” —Nell Freudenberger, author of Lucky Girls and The Dissident

“This is a tremendous book. Yu Hua is really one of the best Chinese contemporary writers.”—Liu Kang, Professor of Chinese Studies, Duke University

“[Yu Hua] is without contest one of the most brilliant and abrasive representatives of young Chinese literature. . . . A kind of masterpiece.”  —Livres Hebdo

“Brothers is the ambitious work of a gifted author who regards the universe with a dismayed eye, but not without affection, and who takes us without pause from laughter to tears, from tomfoolery to tragedy, from barbarism to internationalism. . . . Brothers is without a doubt the most insolent of Yu Hua’s novels.” —Liberation

“Yu Hua’s writing possesses enough lightness that the reading, buoyed by short chapters, holds up through 700 pages. From the beginning, the humorous tone shocks with its propensity toward exaggeration; surprising glimmers of toilet humor bring about an enlightened story. . . . Brothers has the heft of the great literary classics, but prefers an absurd, burlesque tone to their eloquence. However, it’s this atypical voice . . . that gives Brothers the penetrating force of a great work. . . . An unsettling creation in the image of real China.” —Evene

“With the monumental Brothers, Yu Hua showed his satiric wit without attracting the guns of the Chinese government. . . . A scathing portrait of a nation eternally comatose. . . . This novel, steeped in black humor, is frightening–and gives a very different image of real China than the one being peddled now, on the eve of the Olympics.” —Lire

“Brothers combines all shades of narrative: tragedy, pathos, lyricism, realism, satire, and burlesque. The reader feels pity, fascination, and fear, but above all, he enjoys himself.” —Le Magazine litteraire

“Yu Hua effortlessly moves from the grotesque to the tragic and from the ironic to the dramatic. . . . There is Hemingway in Yu Hua, certainly, but also Stendhal.”  —Le Monde

“The evocation of childhood survival makes up the most beautiful pages of this daring book, which crosses fifty years of history with inexhaustible endurance. And if its vulgarity seems more suited to the 21st-century, if extravagance encroaches little by little into the narration, it’s only a metaphor of the decline of a civilization gripped by capitalism. . . . Yu Hua tells this saga at triple-gallop, alternating between cutting sentences and passages of infinite softness. This invective, full of political rage, denounces the constant about-faces of his compatriots, who are torn between blind obedience and outraged dignity. And then suddenly . . . his anger is replaced by tender and lyrical writing, filled with love for his characters. Yu Hua creates a melodrama like no one dares do anymore–with tears and blood, treasons and reunions–all with considerable humor up his sleeve. Because “when the forest is large, one finds all sorts of birds ; when the mob is large, one hears all sorts of laughter . . . hearty laughs, discrete laughs, sharp laughs, airy laughs, dirty laughs, deceitful laughs, stupid laughs, dry laughs, watered-down laughs, and dim laughs.”  —Telerama

“A passionate novel. At breakneck pace, the reader crosses forty years of Chinese history.” —Metro

“With this incredible portrait of the Chinese revolution, author Yu Hua has achieved a tour de force.” —Aujourd’hui en France

“A student of Chinese will have come across some form of the saying, ‘In China everything is true, and the opposite, as well.’ The same can be said for this novel of Yu Hua, where torture and luxury . . . generosity and grimness, drama and farce never cease to intermingle. . . . With cleverness and gleeful malice, Yu Hua overturns the words of Mao, the slogans of his grand propaganda campaigns. . . . Engrossing, epic.” —Le Temps (Geneve)

“A fluid narrative, magnificently directed, that goes from picaresque novel to historic saga to burlesque. A fantastic port of entry for understanding the China of 2008.” —La Croix

“Impressive. . . . In 700 pages that can be read in one breath, Yu Hua embarks on a narrative that is picaresque, Rabelaisian, and massive, that is not afraid of anything–not melodrama or vulgarity or big emotions or scatology or poetry–because it transcends all that to create a novel that is powerful in its vision of a completely raw China. . . . Read for pleasure and a better understanding of what’s happening in [China].” – La Libre Belgique

“Sweeping and ambitious, this novel of more than 700 pages is a masterpiece that contains all the hopes of a generation. . . . Inventive and surprising.” —La Voix du Luxembourg

“Brothers is nothing short of brilliant. . . . Enlightening.” —Le Soir (Bruxelles)

“Yu Hua, an author well-known to have the head of a mischievous youth, has given to the public a Rabelaisian anthology that will be talked about everywhere. . . . Yu Hua gives us hope for innovations in the post-Olympic PRC. . . . It’s time that [Chinese] literature frees itself from the “tyranny of the proletariat.”— Le Devoir

“Amuses with its secondary characters and their rambunctious antics, and an overturning of revolutionary language. . . . A tragicomic work where burlesque rubs shoulders with pathos, continuously surprising the reader until the final page.”—LyonCapitale

“Recalls the popular storytellers of another time with its racy, rhythmic and imaginative style. . . . When one finishes the novel, one regrets having to leave these two brothers that have become ours as well.”—La Quinzaine litteraire