'[A] stinging satire from a novelist in exile' Margaret Atwood via Twitter'Believable and brutal, this is Ma Jian's boldest...most elegiac work' FINANCIAL TIMES, BOOK OF THE YEAR In seven dream-like episodes, Ma Jian - the banned Chinese writer hailed as 'China's Solzhenitsyn' - charts the psychological disintegration of a government leader in provincial China who is haunted by nightmares of his violent past. A biting dystopian satire, what Ma Jian reveals is a nation blinded by materialism and governed by violence and lies. Blending tragic and absurd reality with myth and fantasy, this is not a portrait of an imagined future, but of China as it is today. After decades of loyal service, Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with promoting President Xi Jinping’s China Dream of national rejuvenation.
