Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning

Description

An electrifying story about the explosive power of secrets, from a celebrated Chinese novelist Infamous local thug Hongyang is found dead by his lover after a night of debauched drinking. Hongyang is a man with plenty of enemies, any one of whom could be responsible for his death... Piecing together the story of Hongyang's violent criminal past through the voices of his friends, family, and his former lover Aiwan, Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning is a breathless and immersive journey into China's criminal underworld. It is also a terrifying snapshot of a society in which cynicism and suspicion reign supreme. Written with Yi's trademark confident prose and taut, suspenseful style, this is an unmissable read from a star of Chinese literature.

Born in 1976 in Ruichang, in the province of Jiangxi, A Yi worked as a policeman, sports journalist and editor before deciding to dedicate himself to writing at the age of thirty-two. After a brief period on the editorial board of Chinese literary magazine Chutzpah/Tian Nan, he began working in a publishing house. His first work, a collection of short stories, was released in 2008. In 2010 he published his second story collection, The Bird Saw Me, to popular and critical acclaim. In 2012, his novel A Perfect Crime was published in China (English edition Oneworld, 2015). Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning is his latest work, first published in China in 2017.

'A Yi describes [power] in prose that flies at the reader like sparks from a knife being sharpened. But there's also exquisite precision... Nicky Harman's translation is superb, not a sentence out of place... It's tempting to view the book as A Yi's unflinching take on a moral vacuum at the heart of contemporary China, but he is also lowering his bucket into a much deeper well of delicious literary misanthropy.' -- New Internationalist