Midnight Stories collects ten tales of small-town life with a macabre twist, including a business scheme involving a Madonna lookalike, a disastrous roof repair job, and bloody murder over a missold watermelon. Through a darkly comic lens, Su Tong interweaves cruelty and kindness in a characteristically surreal mode both nightmarish and lyrical.

Echoing Lu Xun’s portrayal of useless scholars, Yang Zhengguang’s psychodrama satirises the chauvinist who believes he is above it all. It critiques the pressure to achieve while 'laying flat’ to unrealistic expectations and offers an insight into the delusions we cling to in justifying our tedious daily routines.

First published in 1984 and written by China’s leading female author, this bestselling semi-autobiographical novella offers an examination of youthful rebellion in an age where anything seems possible, and the close-knit relationship between two sisters simultaneously separated by less than a decade in time and an epoch in history.

One Day Three Autumns was written to preserve the memory of the author's sixth uncle, a talented artist whose paintings were tragically burned after his death. It attempts to bring them back to life in writing, proving that those we love are never truly gone, and that a home is more than what we choose to fill it with.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mei comes of age in a once-grand courtyard dominated by her grandmother, a survivor of violence who inflicts the same kind of control upon her family that she once resisted. But the matriarch is unable to repel the political storm that comes to their home and leaves death and a traumatised young girl in its wake.

Detective Ran Dongong is the first at the scene when the body of a dead young woman is found floating near a lakeside luxury hotel. Her investigations soon lead her into a web centred on the scandalous affairs of a powerful businessman, but when she begins to see echoes of the case everywhere, she can’t resist interrogating her own marriage.