Description: Yang Lian's most personal work to date draws on family photographs from the 1950s through to the 1970s when he was sent to be "re-educated through labour", digging graves in rural China. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.
Review Quotes: An extraordinary, unique work of something like autobiography, but one ambitious far beyoned the personal... a single major work that remains humane throughout, recalling small familial actions as part of a vast historical process. It is, in many ways, the summation of Yang Lian's writing so far.' - George Szirtes, PBS Bulletin