Product details
- ISBN 9781804540282
- Weight: 280g
- Dimensions: 128 x 196mm
- Publication Date: 08 May 2025
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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The phenomenal #1 Chinese bestseller, with over 4 million copies sold. This is a searing exploration of what makes a hero: a literary masterpiece, available in the English language for the very first time.
The boy grows up in a small village in south China listening to stories about the Colonel: some say he was a legendary army doctor during the war, some say he was a traitor to the Party, still others say he is a wicked sex machine. The stories are bawdy and mesmerizing, always larger than life. Yet in reality, the Colonel is just a middle-aged man who loves his cat. And why on earth does everyone call him 'the Eunuch'?
From these disparate sources, the boy tries to piece together who the Colonel really is, just as he himself grows up in a rapidly changing China. It is not until many years later, when the boy also becomes a middle-aged man, that he would look back and finally solve the puzzle.
Mai Jia was born in 1964 and spent many years in the Chinese intelligence services. His first novel in English, Decoded, was published by Penguin Classics in 2002 and has been translated into over twenty languages. Jia's novels have sold over 10 million copies and he is a winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize, the highest literary honour in China.
Dylan Levi King is a writer and Chinese translator based in Tokyo.
