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Beijing Coma

Beijing Coma

Author(s): Ma Jian

Location(s): Beijing (Peking), China

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): Turn of 21st Century

Location

Content

Dai Wei lies in his bedroom, a prisoner in his body, after he was shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest ten years earlier and left in a coma. As his mother tends to him, and his friends bring news of their lives in an almost unrecognisable China, Dai Wei escapes into his memories, weaving together the events that took him from his harsh childhood in the last years of the Cultural Revolution to his time as a microbiology study at the Beijing University.

As the minute-by-minute chronicling of the lead-up to his shooting becomes ever more intense, the reader is caught in a gripping emotional journey where the boundaries between life and death are increasingly blurred. The result is an outstanding work of fiction and an extraordinary insight into modern China.

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“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...

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