Published for the first time in English byGiramondo, Death Fugue is the boldattempt by a prominent Chinese novelist to confront the legacy of protest and suppressionwhich haunts her generation.

Sheng Keyi was born in Hunan province in 1973 andlives in Beijing. Death Fugue is her sixth novel, and the second to bepublished in English translation, after Northern Girls (2012). It is a bravework of speculative fiction, a cross between Cloud Atlas and 1984, scathingin its irony, ingenious in its use of allegory, and acute in its understandingof the power of writing. The imagination that drives it is exuberant and unconstrained.

In a large square in the centre of Beiping, thecapital of Dayang, a huge tower of excrement appears one day, causing unease inthe population, and ultimately widespread civil unrest. The protest, in whichpoets play an important part, is put down violently. Haunted by the violence,and by his failure to support his girlfriend Qizi, who is one of the protestleaders, Yuan Mengliu gives up poetry in favour of medicine, and the antisepticenvironment of the operating theatre. But every year he travels in search of Qizi,and on one of these trips, caught in a storm, he wakes to find himself in aperfect society called Swan Valley. In this utopia, as he soon discovers, impulseand feeling are completely controlled, and every aspect of life regulated forthe good of the nation, with terrible consequences.

Reviewed here in the New York Times