A picaresque novel of modern China from the author of the controversial banned novel The Fat Years.

Chan Koonchung was born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong. He was a reporter at an English newspaper in Hong Kong before he founded the influential magazine "City" in 1976, where he was the chief editor and then publisher for 23 years. He is also a screenwriter and film producer of both Chinese and English-language films. Chan is a co-founder of the Hong Kong environmental group Green Power and was a board member of Greenpeace International from 2008 to 2011. He recently founded the NGO, Minjian International, that connects Chinese public intellectuals with their counterparts in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. His google account is often blocked. He is fluent in English. Chan now lives in Beijing. Nicky Harman lives in the UK. She translates from Chinese, focussing on fiction, poetry and sometimes literary non-fiction, and is a regular contributor to the literary magazines Chutzpah, and Words Without Borders. She mentors new translators and was one of the judges for the Harvill Secker Young Translators Prize 2012. She was Translator-in-Residence at the Free Word Centre, London, in 2011. Her home page is here: http://paper-republic.org/nickyharman/ .