A riveting read and an illuminating one. * The Atlantic * Fang Fangs Soft Burial beautifully evokes the intergenerational trauma stemming from the Land Reform Movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This is a fantastic novel, an excellent translation, and an important contribution to modern Chinese literature and world literature. -- Levi S. Gibbs, author of Song King: Connecting People, Places, and Past in Contemporary China Fang Fang is a powerful voice in contemporary Chinese literature, recognized for her steadfast attention to the underdogs of society. Through poignant and compassionate storytelling, she delves into the depths of the human condition, challenging readers to confront difficult truths with empathy and understanding. -- Zhang Ling, author of Where Waters Meet Soft Burial questions the value of information and the ways in which it is delivered and received, acknowledging the pain of the past yet quietly suggesting that remembrance is critical to an honest civilization. * Necessary Fiction * Soft Burial is an absorbing look at an important period of modern Chinese history, with Fang poking her finger into an open wound, determined to make the reader reexamine what they think they know. * Tony's Reading List * Soft Burials force arises from its insistently interconnected threads. Lives that form a unity never fully glimpse the ways they have been knotted together... The subject is the individual self molded, remolded, surviving, or being consumed by cataclysmic change. * New York Review of Books * The Chinese authorities feared Fang Fangs book because it revealed the horror of a time that remains unspoken, and because it encouraged that mistrust to fall on the government, rather than ones fellow citizens. * The New Statesman *
