Liang Xiaosheng's tribute to arduous lives is ultimately a tribute to truth, goodness, and beauty — for in his struggling characters, we never encounter selfish desires or tainted souls.
—Gao Yuanbao (Literary Critic, Fudan University Professor)

From early Educated Youth literature to post-reform market critiques, while Liang's peers have moved on, he alone remains — pen as banner, steadfast in his crusade for justice, charging forward without retreat.
—Chen Xiaoming (Literary Critic, Peking University Professor)

Despite vast changes since the 1990s, Liang Xiaosheng's impassioned voice remains uniquely powerful — his works continue to offer readers genuine intellectual fulfillment.
—Zhang Yiwu, Literary Critic

★Recommended by CCTV's "Reading" Program | Winner of the National Outstanding Novel Award | Included in the University of Washington's Advanced Chinese Textbook Series

★Reclaiming the dignity of a father marked by the old society — Through shifting emotional dynamics between father and child, Liang Xiaosheng reveals the warmth within a generation's suffering.

★The profound love of Chinese fathers & the spiritual world of traditional families — This autobiographical work documents Liang's personal memories with his father, confronting rarely discussed familial truths.

★A mirror for fathers and children — This book enables intergenerational perspective-taking, where every father and child may find their reflection.
★Includes six seminal works: "Father", "Northern Forests", "Master Fitter Wang", "Military Pigeon", "The Locked Diary", and "Ice Dam".

"The Father" chronicles Liang Xiaosheng's relationship with his working-class parent through unvarnished prose. As the family's sole breadwinner, the inarticulate father silently endured life's hardships. His ignorance and narrow-mindedness once scarred his children and strained familial bonds — yet in old age, he began reunderstanding these relationships. When the child becomes middle-aged, the father's social identity now depends on the son's stature. Herein lies the central dilemma: how to restore the father's independent dignity within this new dynamic?

Liang Xiaosheng (original name ​​Liang Shaosheng​​) is one of the representative symbols of contemporary Chinese culture and one of the representative contemporary Chinese literary figures. He is also one of the important contemporary Chinese realist writers. He is known as the “writer of the common people” because he is good at focusing on the ups and downs of ordinary people's lives in great times. His works are characterized by a strong sense of reality and a commoner's sentiment. Together with Wang Meng, Lu Yao, Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Tie Ning and others, he has become an important window for observing contemporary Chinese society and cultural trends.

Some readers consider Liang Xiaosheng as the “Chinese Balzac,” because he is committed to writing a “social encyclopedia” and portraying the destinies of people from all walks of life. His works are often used as important texts for studying and understanding Chinese social and cultural developments between the 1980s and 2020s. His work Chinese Peach and Plum is included in the collections of many overseas libraries. His work Father is selected as a textbook for advanced Chinese courses published by the University of Washington Press in the United States.

He has so far created more than ten million words of works, including essays, novels, miscellaneous discussions, and documentary literature. His representative work, The Story of "A Lifelong Journey​", won the 10th Mao Dun Literature Prize. This novel has a cumulative circulation of more than 2 million copies and are called the “fifty-year history of Chinese people's lives”. The TV drama adapted from it caused a nationwide viewing craze as soon as it was broadcast and set a new record for the prime-time viewership of CCTV (with a total audience scale of 371 million people). Disney purchased the overseas distribution rights of the drama in the first month of its production. His another long novel Snow City is selected into the “70 Classic Chinese Novels of New China's 70 Years”.

His works have been translated into English, French, Russian, Japanese, and Italian. The author was awarded as one of the “Top Ten Writers of the 2024 Hall of Fame Annual Humanities List”. In 2023, he was named as the “Cultural Figure of the Year” among the “2022 Annual Influential People” by China Newsweek. Since 1984, his name has been listed in the "World Who's Who" in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

The Father
Northern Forests
Master Fitter Wang
Military Pigeon
The Locked Diary
Ice Dam

My father and I borrowed a handcart to haul coal in the pouring rain. The journey was long — the coal voucher had been issued at a depot near the railway tracks, over fifteen kilometers from our neighborhood. We split one ton of coal into three trips. By the time we set out for the third load, darkness had fallen.
Then disaster struck: a wheel jammed in the railroad switch. No matter how hard we pushed or pulled, the cart wouldn't budge, as if welded to the tracks. Covered in mud, our hands lacerated, we alternated between pushing together and pulling separately, but remained helpless. Through the downpour, I heard my father's labored breathing, like an ox straining at the plow.
Wiping rainwater from my face, I shouted, "Dad, stay here! I'll get help from the signal house!"
"Where's your strength?!" He shoved me aside abruptly, bending to shoulder the cart with his atrophied muscles.
A train's whistle sounded in the distance. As lightning flashed, I saw loose skin whipped mercilessly by the storm — an old man's strengthless back. The locomotive's beam swept toward us.
My father kept applying his pitiful effort.
I sprinted to the signal house.
The train screeched to a halt.
A railway worker ran back with me.
My father still strained against the cart, seemingly oblivious to the approaching train.
"You goddamn fool!" the worker cursed viciously.
In the locomotive's glare, my father finally straightened up. When he slowly raised his head, I saw absolute despair carved into his wrinkle-ravaged face — each furrow like an exclamation mark, more than even in that letter he'd written to my brother...
Rain streamed down his weathered face.
But I knew those weren't just raindrops. His vacant, widened eyes, twitching cheeks, and trembling lips testified to that...
This stormy night brought back another from years before—when I'd hidden between timber stacks at my army unit and wept uncontrollably...