Braised Pork

So elegant and poised, so tuned to the great mysteries of love and loss. Like a breeze on a still day, An Yu’s is a voice I didn't know I needed until I felt it. Braised Pork is a major debut

John Freeman

Braised Pork is mesmerising, incisive and utterly disarming. An Yu writes beautifully about loneliness, the experience of isolation — from others, from one’s own past — and the possibility of human connection, however fragile.

Rosie Price

Bold yet understated, Braised Pork is the debut of a supremely confident and gifted writer.

Katie Kitamura

What a singular, slippery, transfixing novel this is. An Yu achieves a hypnotizing emotional clarity as she takes her narrator ever further from a stifling life in Beijing into a watery realm unlike any I've read before.

Idra Novey

An elegant, dreamlike tale of a woman’s self-realisation in contemporary Beijing. Yu’s writing has an arresting, unadorned lyricism

Francesca Carington, Daily Telegraph

Rich and strange … Braised Pork is a debut that gets under your skin

Anthony Cummins, Observer

A seductive, sharply observed tale of love, loss and hope that moves from high-rise Beijing to rural Tibet and the mysterious, magical ‘world of water’

Fanny Blake, Daily Mail

A startlingly original imagination... Braised Pork is a sensitive portrait of alienated young womanhood as it is set free

Shahidha Bari, Guardian

Yu’s novel has a cool, poised elegance that only adds to its enigmatic allure

Economist

A dizzying read… An Yu writes with style and in a way that is hard to resist

Lucy Knight, Sunday Times

This exquisite novel is many things: a detective story in which the real object of pursuit is how one makes meaning of a sometimes ineffable existence; a meditation on the talismanic power of art and the indefatigability of the human spirit; and a many-faceted, perfectly cut gem of psychological portraiture set in well-wrought sentences burnished to a gorgeous luster. The emotions in this book keep pace with you, shadowing you with a quiet intensity, until in the last stretch they overtake you completely.

Matthew Thomas

What a singular, slippery, transfixing novel this is. An Yu achieves a hypnotizing emotional clarity as she takes her narrator ever further from a stifling life in Beijing into a watery realm unlike any I've read before.

Idra Novey

Bold yet understated, Braised Pork is the debut of a supremely confident and gifted writer.'

Katie Kitamura