- Published: 31 July 2013
- ISBN: 9781407018928
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 688
Beijing Coma
- Published: 31 July 2013
- ISBN: 9781407018928
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 688
This is an epic yet intimate work that deserves to be recognised and to endure as the great Tiananmen novel ... a magnificent book brim-full of humanity, insight and humour ... beautifully translated by Flora Drew
James Kynge, Financial Times
A modern literary masterpiece ... Ma Jian has created an intense, passionate and painful-to-read parable for today.. The elegant and bravura writing of Ma Jian is utterly convincing
Sunday Express
Monumental...riveting. This vivid, pungent, often blackly funny book is a mighty gesture of remembrance against the encroaching forces of silence
James Lasdun, Guardian
A huge achievement ... a landmark account through fiction of a country whose rise has amazed the world, but which remains cloaked in shadows... finely written and translated
Jonathan Fenby, The Times
In scene after scene of black satire, lyric tenderness and desolating tragedy…this fearless epic of history and memory establishes the exiled Ma Jian as the Solzhenitsyn of China’s forgetful drive towards world-domination’
Boyd Tonkin, Independent
Once in a while - perhaps every 10 years, or even every generation - a novel appears that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of a country at a defining moment in its history, but of the universal right to remember and to hope. It is, in every sense, a landmark work of fiction
Tash Aw, Daily Telegraph
Powerful and exhilirating... Simultaneously a large-scale portrait of citizens writing in the grip of the party and the state and a strikingly intimate study of the fragility of the body and the persistence of self and memory
Chandrahas Choudhury, Observer
A powerful, compelling read… It is, without a doubt, one of the most dramatic endings to a novel I’ve ever read. Beijing Coma held my attention for an entire month. It is a brave and audacious book, brimming with idealism, chaos and horror. If you like your fiction rooted in fact, with a choppy, fast-paced narrative, and a conclusion that leaves you reeling, then do add this one to the list.
Reading Matters