Hard Like Water

- Blurb -

A laugh-out-loud political and sexual satire about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, by the acclaimed author of Serve The People!Hard Like Water is a brilliant satire about love and revolution- a thrilling story about an erotic affair during China' s Cultural Revolution. In revolutionary struggle, if you don' t defeat your enemy, your enemy will defeat you. . . On his return to his hometown-and his wife-to aid the Cultural Revolution, soldier Aijun sees a young woman wandering barefoot along the railway tracks in the late-afternoon sun. Her name is Hongmei. From this moment on, an ' unspeakably beautiful flower' blooms in Aijun' s heart. Aijun and Hongmei hurl themselves into the town' s revolutionary struggle, spending their days and nights stamping out feudalism, writing pamphlets and attending rallies- they are the engines of history. But soon their sexual and revolutionary fervour begin to merge and a crazed new love explodes between them. The party bosses are impressed by the ardour of the pair' s work. Emboldened, the couple build a ' tunnel of love' -to further the revolution, of course, but also to connect their homes and create a ' nuptial chamber' for their secret rendezvous. But when Hongmei' s husband finds them there one evening, and the young couple are arrested for framing a comrade, their dreams of a life together begin to fall apart. In the spirit of Serve the People!, Yan Lianke' s sparkling first novel in English, Hard Like Water is a thoroughly entertaining tale of sexual infatuation and revolutionary zeal, a universal human drama about the nature of political power, the danger of hubris, and the freewheeling momentum of love and sexual desire-from one of China' s greatest contemporary writers.