From one of China’s most highly regarded writers, winner of the Franz Kafka Prize and twice finalist for the International Booker Prize, Three Brothers is a beautiful and heartwrenching memoir of the author’s childhood and family life during the Cultural Revolution In this heartfelt, intimate memoir, Yan Lianke brings the reader into his childhood home in Song County in Henan Province, painting a vivid portrait of rural China in the 1960s and ’70s. Three Brothers is a literary testament to the great humanity and small joys that exist even in times of darkness. With lyricism and deep emotion, Yan chronicles the extraordinary lives of his father and uncles, as well as his own. Living in a remote village, Yan’s parents are so poor that they can only afford to use wheat flour on New Year and festival days, and while Yan dreams of fried scallion buns, and even steals from his father to buy sesame seed cakes. He yearns to leave the village, however he can, and soon novels become an escape. He resolves to become a writer himself after reading on the back of a novel that its author was given leave to remain in the city of Harbin after publishing her book. In the evenings, after finishing back-breaking shifts hauling stones at a cement factory, sometimes sixteen hours long, he sets to work writing. He is ultimately delivered from the drudgery and danger of manual labor by a career in the Army, but he is filled with regrets as he recalls these years of scarcity, turmoil, and poverty. A philosophical portrait of grief, death, home, and fate that gleams with Yan’s quick wit and gift for imagery, Three Brothers is a personal portrait of a politically devastating period, and a celebration of the power of the family to hold together even in the harshest circumstances. Praise for Three Brothers An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Memoir) “This memoir of growing up during the Cultural Revolution focuses on Yan’s memories of his family: his father, who toiled in their field; his elder uncle, who sold home-made socks and wore a jacket covered with patches; and his younger uncle, thought to be the one who got away, who worked long shifts at a cement factory. Yan recalls both the immense pleasure brought by simple luxuries―candies, sweet potatoes, a shiny polyester shirt―and the initial allure of the city, where life seemed to have meaning beyond the repetition of the harvest and building tile-roofed houses for one’s children to get married in. He left, eventually settling in Beijing, only to yearn for his ancestral land.” ― New Yorker “An elegiac tribute to [Yan’s] father’s generation, who labored for a lifetime to build traditional houses for their sons and provide dowries for their daughters. They succeeded, only to have their world swept away by rapid change . . . The land could do without him, he reflects, but he could not do without the land. ‘Without that village,’ he laments, ‘I would be nothing.’” ―Isabel Hilton, Financial Times “A moving story of family, loss, and self-discovery . . . Lianke also explores his own path toward becoming a writer, which makes for some of this book’s most memorable moments.” ―Tobias Carroll, Words without Borders “This engaging book asks readers to consider the nature of life and death, city versus country, and the impact generations can have on each other.” ― Winnipeg Free Press “If Yan’s memoir owes its existence to family, it is because every blessing in Yan’s life owed its existence to family, as Yan’s unflinching self-examination demonstrates plainly . . . Yan is concerned with death in this arresting work, not only the death of loved ones, but of a whole moment in Chinese history that, for ever more young people, is incomprehensible and even non-existent . . . As a peasant who was able to write himself out of the fields and into international celebrity, Yan poignantly shows that the most effective antidote to death is gratitude.” ― Full Stop “ Three Brothers includes length meditations on fate, change, happiness, and what Yan calls ‘life’ as opposed to ‘living’ . . . What breathes life into these themes and ideas is Yan’s impressionistic form of family biography . . . By collapsing time, this almost Proustian method frequently brings both Yan and the reader face to face with himself.” ― South China Morning Post “A leading Chinese novelist, famous for sharp satire, tells the story of his family’s hardscrabble life with surprising tenderness . . . Complicated and powerful.” ― Booklist (starred review) “Throughout the book, Yan depicts his provincial relatives with enormous heart and respect, acknowledging their sacrifices in a dark yet poignant meditation on grief and death . . . A memoir stepped in metaphor and ultimately tremendously moving.” ― Kirkus Reviews “Full of love, sorrow, and tenderness, Yan Lianke’s memoir offers a deeply heartfelt account of his family in the 1960s and 70s. Three Brothers is a must read for anyone who wants to understand post-Mao China and a