Mo Yan's Boxer Rebellion novel an orgy of pain and pleasure

Mo Yan's first novel to be published in English since he won last year's Nobel prize for literature is a strange, gruesome, vivid and ambitious historical novel set during the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1901). As the 20th century struggles into being, the grand narratives that will dominate most of the next 100 years (war, genocide, empire, economics, technology, guerilla warfare) are played out in ways that are at once intimate and epic, personal and political, realistic and surreal.

At the centre of is a slippery young woman, Sun Meiniang, whose (father), Sun Bing, is imprisoned for helping lead the revolution. In her opening chapter alone, Meiniang is adulterous and loyal, loving and lustful, conniving and innocent. Conveniently enough for the reader (though not for Sun), her father's fate will be decided by two men in her most intimate circle.

The political and legal judgment falls to Qian Ding, the newly appointed magistrate of Gaomi County. He not only has history with Sun (an intense love-hate rivalry that culminates with a splendidly odd "battle of the beards" contest), he has more than a little with Meiniang: the pair have had a love-love relationship - until Sun's incarceration that is.

"Magistrate, I presented you with a body silkier than the finest Suzhou satin and sweeter than Cantonese sugar melon … now after all the pampering and voyages into erotic fairyland, why will you not let my go free?'