Wuhan

“If you want to know how little a human life counts in China’s dictatorship, you must read this book.”Herta Müller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature“Liao Yiwu is a writer of tremendous courage and honesty. His writings, deeply humane, sparkle with humour and sharply observed details. A bleak world often becomes funny, even poetic, under his pen.”Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans“Liao Yiwu combines deep research with extraordinary imaginative skills to counter the Communist Party’s efforts at erasing the outbreak of the deadly coronavirus in Wuhan. A vital, compelling read.”Ian Johnson, Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations“Liao Yiwu’s Wuhan combines fiction, non-fiction, and his own kind of journalism to produce a fever dream of a book, exploring and exploding the Wuhan lockdown following the outbreak of the Coronavirus in China in 2020. As a dissident living in exile, Liao’s focus is consistently on those who attempt to tell the truth in China, as well as on the state agents committed to stopping the truth-tellers, jailing and even killing them on occasion, as Liao brilliantly illustrates with reference to dissidents from other times and places, showing that Wuhan was in no way an exception. Told in Liao’s inimitable style, the book is a monument to the human refusal to yield to state power.”David Ownby, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

“extraordinary”Mark Honigsbaum, The Observer“testament to the importance of literary memory… Liao connects the effort to document truth in the teeth of repression to other places and histories, while shades of Elie Wiesel and Solzhenitsyn haunt his account of vanishing truth tellers.”Isabel Hilton, Prospect“compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand the black comic absurdity of the initial response to COVID-19, the courage of Chinese citizens determined to speak for truth, and the tragic price they can pay for it.” Sydney Morning Herald

Liao Yiwu is a Chinese writer living in Berlin.