Nobel permanent secretary Peter Englund picked out The Garlic Ballads, first published in English in 1995, as Mo Yan’s gateway book. Set in rural China in the 20th century, it tells the story of the peasants of Paradise County, whose lives, which have gone on more or less unchanged for hundreds of years, are ordered to plant just one crop - garlic - and are then left high and dry when the same officials who gave the order claim a glut on the market and refuse to buy any more of their produce. The book, which has been compared to Catch-22 and The Grapes of Wrath, was banned in Mo’s native China in the wake of the protests in Tianamen Square
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Mo Yan's best-known work in the west, thanks to Zhang Yimou's 1987 film, which was based on the first two chapters of the novel, Red Sorghum follows three generations of a family as they survive all the horrors that the 20th century unleashed on rural China. The story is told in flashbacks by the grandson of a woman who becomes a folk hero after she is shot dead by Japanese troops as she carries food to the village’s resistance fighters. However, it's not only the Japanese that the villagers have to contend with in the violent 1930s, but a history of banditry that repeatedly devastates the shimmering red sorghum fields
Read Natasha Walter’s review in The Independent Photograph: Public Domain
When special Investigator Ding Gou'er arrives in the Republic of Wine to investigate rumours of cannibalism, he is honoured with a banquet at which the food may not be all it seems. As he falls into an alcoholic stupor he is assailed by nightmares - a dwarf, a scaly demon, a troupe of small boys raised for eating and a sinister cookery teacher. Mo Yan's commentary on China's relationship with food unfolds in two narrative threads – one a detective story and the other a series of letters between “Mo Yan” and a fan
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This collection of short stories written over two decades ranges from comedy to tragedy via fantasy and fable. A laid-off model worker tries to become a capitalist; a boy eats iron; a girl child is abandoned; a bride floats away. Inspired, said Mo, by hunger and loneliness - as a child enduring rural famine he was driven to eating coal - the stories won him comparisons to Kafka for his treatment of crushing bureaucracy and the individual will to survive
Read the 2005 Guardian review Photograph: Public Domain
Spanning the 20th century, this grand-scale narrative is built around the fortunes of Shangguan Lu, born in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. Her father is murdered by German soldiers and her mother follows soon after, killing herself and leaving Shangguan hidden under a flour vat. Brought up by an aunt, she goes on to marry a husband "as useless as a gob of snot", before embarking on a series of liaisons that result in eight children, including the much-treasured son, "Golden Boy", who narrates
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This "bizarre romp through the Chinese countryside", a tale of "sharp hatchets, bad water, and a rusty WWII mortar", will be published next January by the Seagull Press to rather more interest than they could have anticipated. It’s a dual narrative, in which an old monk listens to a novice’s tale of carnivorous depravity while a family tragedy unfurls; the publishers compare it to Gunter Grass and Witold Gombrowicz Photograph: Public Domain
