The Dark Road

The Dark Road follows the river-borne escape of fugitives from the one-child policy. An ill-matched couple’s flight along anarchic backwaters leads them into a raw, brutal, brilliantly depicted boom-time underworld

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

One of China’s most prominent dissident voices addresses the bleak effects of the one-child policy in this striking novel, in which the brutality of social engineering is made graphically plain. Ma Jian’s work is banned in China; this unflinching portrait of one woman’s struggle against oppression makes it sadly easy to understand why

New Statesman

[Ma Jian’s] characterization is superb… A devastating critique of China’s oppressive communist regime

Mail on Sunday

Unforgettable

Stephen Abell, Sunday Telegraph

Ma’s work is a vital corrective and he writes here with insistent, focused anger

Siobhan Murphy, Metro

A writer of rare orgininality... All of Ma’s skill and playfulness are on display as the novel builds to a climax in which Meili is forced to question her very right to exist in this fragile, ever-changing new world

Tash Aw, Guardian

Ma Jian is a writer of rare originality whose work effortlessly combines a sense of the avant garde with uncomfortable humour, underpinned at all times by rage at the social changes that have affected China over the last 30 years

Tash Aw, Guardian