“Dong Xi’s Echo, in an artistic form rich in cognitive and expressive power, explores the spiritual condition of contemporary urban life. In a structure that advances society and family on two parallel lines, it draws out thread by thread and holds up to the light the tangled workings of the human heart and of human nature. Reality and psychology, hallucination and truth, predicament and redemption, the collision of dialogues makes a drama of the soul, and forcefully verifies and confirms the foundation stones of our life: truth, understanding, love and justice.”
——Citation of the 11th Mao Dun Literature Prize (11 August 2023)

“Dong Xi is a novelist who, writing of the east, invariably writes of the west, and in writing of the west is always looking at the east. What Echo writes is exactly this: the nearest and the farthest, the closest kin and the most distant.”
——Li Jingze (Vice Chairman of the China Writers Association, literary critic)

“The narrative of Echo is superb, as readable as it is worth rereading… the odd and even chapters advance along different threads, flash into mutual echo, entangle and collide, setting off countless echoes. Every character offers another angle, and what that brings is a specimen cross-section of society, of the era, of the individual, of the family.”
——Pan Kaixiong (Member of the National Committee of the China Writers Association, literary critic)

“It writes the echo, in reality, of the emotional patterns of our time. What is love?… He has written a contagious disease none of us in this era knows we have: the lack of love and the distrust of others, and the hunger for the capacity to love.”
——Zhang Li (Professor, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University; literary critic)

“Echo might be described as: detection outside, psychology inside; ethics on the surface, philosophy at the core.”
——Zhang Qinghua (literary critic)

“Dong Xi’s earlier fiction was like a lit fuse, with a kind of smoking anger. Echo still has anger, but I see in it the moderation of anger I had hoped for.”
——Su Tong (novelist)

★ In 2023 Echo won the 11th Mao Dun Literature Prize. The citation commended a structure advancing society and family on two parallel lines, “drawing out thread by thread and holding up to the light” the tangle of the human heart and of human nature.
★ A policewoman hunting a killer finds her own marriage an unsolved case. Odd chapters work the crime, even chapters work the heart, and the two lines meet in the last chapter. Critics call it psychological realism: a detective frame around character excavation.
★ Since publication in 2021, all editions combined have passed 400,000 copies. It was a China Book of the Year for 2021 and appeared on twelve year-end lists and awards, including Southern Weekly’s and China Reading Weekly’s.
★ Feng Xiaogang directed the 2023 series, starring Song Jia and Wang Yang, with the author as screenwriter. It ran on iQIYI’s Mist Theater, closed above 8,800 on the heat index, and topped that slate’s chart.
★ Rights are sold in Vietnamese, Russian, English, Korean, French, Malay, Arabic and Burmese, among more than ten languages. The English edition is from Sinoist Books in Britain; the Malay edition from Dewan Bahasa Pustaka, its first Mao Dun winner.

Xijiang police officer Ran Dongdong is working the Dakeng case: Xia Bingqing, a young woman, has drowned in the river, her right hand severed. The investigation turns up an absurd chain of commissions. Xu Shanchuan, a hotel owner, pays his cousin Xu Haitao to “settle” Xia Bingqing, with whom he has been entangled for years, so that his name stays clean; Xu Haitao passes the job to Wu Wenchao, who runs a creative agency; Wu Wenchao turns to a middleman, Liu Qing; Liu Qing finally hires Yi Chunyang to do the killing. At every link each man stands exactly one step removed, and each can find a reason to be innocent. What Ran Dongdong has to topple is the first domino.

Meanwhile her marriage begins to echo. Her husband, Mu Dafu, has checked into the same hotel twice in two months. She brings her interrogation technique home, strips the disguise layer and works down to the wound, signs the divorce papers, and draws closer to Shao Tianwei, a younger colleague. Only when a wiretap recording fixes the killer does she see, in her own self-examination, a second truth: she has long been in love with Shao Tianwei, and somewhere beneath the surface she was hoping her husband would slip, so that leaving could be justified.

Case and marriage are mirrors of each other. The sharper her insight into other minds, the slower her knowledge of her own. When every party to the affair can excuse himself, the hardest person to put on trial is Ran Dongdong.

Dong Xi is the pen name of Tian Dailin, male, Han, born April 1966, a native of Tian’e, Guangxi.
He is chairman of the Guangxi Federation of Literary and Art Circles, chairman of the Guangxi Writers Association, and director of the Literature, Film and Television Creative Centre at Guangxi Minzu University; a second-tier professor and master’s supervisor; a member of the Presidium of the Tenth National Committee of the China Writers Association and of the Eleventh National Committee of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles; and a deputy to the 14th National People’s Congress.
He is among the third batch of national “Ten Thousand Talents Programme” leading talents in philosophy and social sciences, a member of the “Four Batches” talent programme of the national publicity and culture system, a recipient of the State Council special allowance, and a holder of the title National Advanced Worker.
He graduated in 1985 from Hechi Teachers College with a major in Chinese and taught at Tian’e County Middle School. He then served as a staff member of the Tian’e County Party Committee propaganda department, secretary of the Hechi Prefecture administrative office, reporter and editor at the Hechi Daily, and deputy director of the supplement department of the Guangxi Daily. In 2002 he became a writer at the Guangxi Art Creation Centre, and from 2005 he has taught at Guangxi Minzu University.
Principal works: the novels Echo, Resounding Slaps, A Record of Regret and A Tampered Fate, and Collected Works of Dong Xi (8 volumes); the novellas and short stories “Life Without Language”, “Our Father”, “Settling It Between Us” and “You Don’t Know How Beautiful She Is”.
His work has been translated and published in English, French, Swedish, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Czech, German, Japanese, Italian, Greek, Thai and Khmer, and several titles have been adapted for film and television.

1 The Pit
2 Entanglement
3 The Plan
4 The Test
5 The Excuse
6 The Hint
7 Business
8 Trust
9 Guilty Love
Afterword