Lead Review

• Book: Lenin’s Kisses
• Location: China
• Author: Yan Lianke

Last year, in a despairing column for the New York Times about personal and political life in China, Yan wrote of an unpublished novel about the Great Leap Forward famine, a novel that he had worked on for 20 years and that had been banned. He has advised writers to confront censorship with “art, not politics”. This baggy but innovative novel, with its wit, humanity and satire, sets a provocative example. Isabel Hilton

Back to book