From a visionary, world-class writer, dubbed “China’s most controversial novelist” by the New Yorker , a gripping and biting story of ambition and betrayal, following two young communist revolutionaries whose forbidden love sets them apart from their traditionally minded village, as the Cultural Revolution sweeps the nation Gao Aijun is a son of the soil of Henan’s Balou Mountains, and after a service in the Army, he is on his way back to his ancestral village, feeling like a hero. Close to his arrival, he sees a strikingly attractive woman walking barefoot alongside a railway track in the warm afternoon sun, and he is instantly smitten. She is Xia Hongmei and lives up to her name of “beautiful flower.” Hiding their relationship from their spouses, the pair hurl themselves into the struggle to bring revolution to their backwater village. They spend their days and nights writing pamphlets, organizing work brigades, and attending rallies, feeling they are the vanguard for the full-blown revolution that is waiting in the wings. Emboldened by encouragement from the Party, the couple dig a literal “tunnel of love” between their homes, where underneath the village their revolutionary and sexual fervor reaches a boiling point. While the unsuspecting villagers sleep, they sing revolutionary songs and compete in shouting-matches of Maoist slogans before making earth-moving love. But when their torrid relationship is finally discovered, and they have to answer to Hongmei’s husband, their dreams of a bright future together begin to fray. Will their great revolutionary energy save their skins, or will they too fall victim to the revolution that is swallowing up the country? A novel of rare emotional force and surprising humor, Hard Like Water is an operatic and brilliantly plotted human drama about power’s corrupting nature and the brute force of love and desire. Praise for Hard Like Water : A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Named a Most Anticipated Book by the Guardian and Book Riot “The novel, a parody, sets itself up as a kind of Maoist Anna Karenina when Aijun arrives home and spots a beautiful young woman at the train station, portending a conclusion just as disastrous and physically gruesome as Tolstoy’s . . . At its core, Hard Like Water seeks to make a mockery of claims to political purity. As Hongmei and Aijun arouse each other with propaganda slogans and revolutionary citations, the novel pokes fun at how easily an ideology can be contorted to satisfy individual desires.” —Jennifer Wilson, New York Times Book Review “A blistering tour de force that wraps itself in ideological language in order to pull out that language by the roots . . . Carlos Rojas’s exceptional translation makes English feel new again. Yan’s linguistic daring, and the novel’s relentless stream of provocative images and observations, create a sensuous and riveting world . . . A sharp, desperately moving analysis of the logic of ideology. Its mashup of literary and political texts poses the uncomfortable and timely question: how did each of us arrive at our certainties?” —Madeleine Thien, Guardian “Like some Bonnie and Clyde of Maoist fanaticism, Aijun and Hongmei set about smashing every bond of family and friendship in pursuit of their blood-red new dawn. Yet self-awareness, even a guilty conscience, never quite deserts this monstrous couple, ‘not only a pair of great revolutionaries but also a pair of abject adulterers.’ That inner conflict gives this book its pulse and point . . . Yan lets us share the aphrodisiac high of revolutionary madness even as he skewers the tyranny of narcissism—and the narcissism of tyranny. Book-burnings, ritual degradations, the arrogant conceit of vanguard youth: his Red Guard era feels both far away and oddly close to home.” —Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times “Boisterous . . . In speech larded with Mao quotes and traditional maxims, Gao reveals how their romance, fuelled by the feverish political climate, pitches the village into ever-escalating extremism—a years-long parade of self-advancing schemes culminating in an unthinkable end.”— New Yorker “The new masterpiece by eminent Chinese writer Yan Lianke . . . Two revolutionaries take matters disastrously into their own hands while conducting a crazed affair.”— Margaret Atwood, on Twitter “A difficult but fascinating work, a novel in which the reader is constantly urged to measure the discrepancy between what’s being said and what’s happening . . . Jonathan Swift said satire is a mirror in which we see everyone’s features but our own . . . Yan’s challenge, to his samizdat readers in China and those beyond, is to look in the murky glass of ambition and self-deception and find the face that resembles their own.” —John Phipps, Times (UK) “[ Hard Like Water ] succeeds in using sensuality as a means to illuminate the period’s interwoven desires, from the physical to the ideological. Gao is all nerve endings, his eyes and ears are always o