The Fat Years

Banned in China, this controversial and politically charged novel tells the story of the search for an entire month erased from official Chinese history. Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one could care less-except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that have possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn-not only about their leaders, but also about their own people-stuns them to the core. It is a message that will astound the world. A kind of Brave New Worldreflecting the China of our times, The Fat Yearsis a complex novel of ideas that reveals all too chillingly the machinations of the postmodern totalitarian state, and sets in sharp relief the importance of remembering the past to protect the future.

CHAN KOONCHUNG is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. Born in Shanghai and raised and educated in Hong Kong, he studied at the University of Hong Kong and Boston University. He has published more than a dozen Chinese-language books and in 1976 founded the monthly magazine City in Hong Kong, of which he was the chief editor and then publisher for twenty-three years. He has been a producer on more than thirteen films. Chan Koonchung now lives in Beijing.