“Through this novel, Mo Yan placed his ‘Northeast Gaomi Township’ on the map of world literature.”
— The New York Times

“He has successfully spread the canvas of history across the frame of the novel… a society on the edge of anarchy.”
— Wilborn Hampton, The New York Times

“His imagery is startling, visceral, gut-wrenching. It is an exciting, even an epic, story.”
— Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club

“A groundbreaking work of ‘new historicism’ — rewriting official war narratives through folk history.”
— Reader

★ “Northeast Gaomi Township is undoubtedly the most beautiful and most ugly, the most transcendent and most worldly, the most sacred and most depraved, the most heroic and most villainous, the most passionate place in the world.” With this novel, Mo Yan put a place that doesn‘t exist on any map onto the map of world literature. The first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize—this is the book that made him.
★ Ranked #18 on the Asian Weekly’s “100 Greatest Chinese Novels of the 20th Century.” Named by World Literature Today as one of “40 Outstanding Works from 75 Years” — the only Chinese novel on the list, praised for its “Tolstoyan sweep.”
★ Zhang Yimou‘s film adaptation won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. A 2014 television series (directed by Zheng Xiaolong) and numerous stage adaptations—opera, dance, theater—have followed.
★ 16 translations of the title story alone; over 50 languages in total. The 1993 English translation by Howard Goldblatt, published by Penguin, was widely reviewed by The New York Times, The London Review of Books, and other major outlets.
★ “In late autumn, the endless sorghum fields turned into a vast sea of blood-red.” A family epic of land, liquor, heroes, and raw courage—you’ll understand why some people live like sorghum: you can‘t burn them out.

On the eighth day of the ninth lunar month in 1939, “my father” Yu Douguan joins Yu Zhan‘ao’s militia to ambush a Japanese motorcade on the Jiaoping Highway. “My grandmother” Dai Fenglian, carrying a load of flatbread to the troops at Ink Water River Bridge, is shot and killed. The novel opens with this scene—an act of sacrifice that defines the fate of a family and the story that follows.

“Red Sorghum” is composed of five interconnected novellas: “Red Sorghum,” “Sorghum Wine,” “Dog Ways,” “Sorghum Funeral,” and “Strange Death.” Yu Zhan‘ao is a sedan-chair carrier. Dai Fenglian, at sixteen, is sold by her father in marriage to the leprous son of the Shan family. On her way to the wedding, Yu Zhan’ao rescues her, and they fall in love. He kills the Shans, and Dai Fenglian takes over the family winery. They live together, fierce and free, in the sorghum fields they love.

When war comes, the village elder, Uncle Luo, is flayed alive by the Japanese. Yu Zhan‘ao raises a militia and ambushes the Japanese army at Jiaoping Highway. The battle is catastrophic—almost all his men are killed. Dai Fenglian is shot while delivering food. Yu Zhan’ao closes her eyes. The novel is told through the retrospective gaze of “I” — a descendant reconstructing the lives of his ancestors, blending family memory with national history.

Mo Yan himself has said: “Red Sorghum was written when I was young, and there are many rough edges in the craft. But that swagger — that mix of hero and rogue — came precisely from the reckless energy of a first-time author.” This is the book that established Mo Yan‘s literary kingdom of Northeast Gaomi Township—the place where he found his voice and his subject for a lifetime.

Mo Yan, born in 1955 in Gaomi, Shandong Province, is a Chinese novelist and short-story writer. He is a professor at Beijing Normal University, director of its International Writing Center, and vice chairman of the China Writers Association.
He was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature — the first Chinese citizen to receive the honor — “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” In 2011, he won the Mao Dun Literature Prize for his novel “Frog.”
His major works include “Red Sorghum,” “The Garlic Ballads,” “Big Breasts and Wide Hips,” “Sandalwood Death,” “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” and “Frog.” He has published eleven novels and over one hundred short stories. His works have been translated into more than fifty languages. He has received the French Laure Bataillon Prize, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Italian Nonino International Prize, and the American Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, among others.