Such Is This World@sars.come

A shy and elegant widow finds her voice in writing for the Internet, and a powerful official seeks her hand. When she learns of a terrifying new disease, she watches online warnings of the plague get eerily deleted before her eyes. Through the Internet she meets a small band of freethinkers, comes to view history in a new light, and finds that truth has a price. Hu Fayun has written the book I’ve dreamed historical fiction that truly captures what China was like during the time of SARS, and that in doing so opens a panoramic historiographical window on modern China... But SARS is really a small part of this book. The book is about freedom, about artistic liberty, about integrity, and about how even the most ardent of reformers can be bought and paid for by a government dangling goodies and perqs... This is a great novel and an unequaled look into contemporary China and how/why it is what it is today. It has everything — suspense, intrigue, history, pathos, romance, sex (briefly), philosophy and politics. A great novel with a great translation. Richard Burger, in The Peking Duck