Yan Lianke
Grove Press
26 January 2027
254
eBook - epub
Contemporary
ARC via NetGalley
In Gaotian Town on China’s Central Plains, one perfectly normal working-class family is aspiring to better things. The son dreams of making enough money to go to America, while his father longs to build a new house like his middle-class neighbors, despite lacking the means to do so. His long-suffering wife worries about her only child’s waywardness and feels she must take matters into her own hands. Unbeknownst to one another, each family member is thinking about killing one of the others.
Class tensions run high in the town, from the wealthiest and most envied family to the girl working at the beauty parlour who longs to escape, and the entrepreneurial grocer whose success has consequences for multiple lives. Set against the turbulent backdrop of social and cultural transformation, we witness a community undone by desperation and desire.
Yan Lianke unflinchingly recounts one family’s slow descent into chaos in a darkly comic voice that is his alone. The Family Plot explores the push and pull of money, modernity, familial strife and the decay of tradition—and the lengths to which people will go as they strive for a better life.
The Family Plot provided a snapshot of an ordinary working class family falling apart. The book touches on many themes including class, tradition, urbanisation and the longing for something 'more' in the many forms that can take. The things I found most interesting in the work were the different narrative styles for the three family members, which really helped to separate them, and the way each narration offered us a very different view of the situation and the family dynamic. After the son's initial narration we feel we know what the mother and father are like, but that gets turned on its head as soon as the father's narrative begins. In the end, you have to wonder if any of the three were telling the full truth, or how much was just within their minds. An intriguing book and I would definitely pick up another work by this author in the future. I am giving it 4 stars.
I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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