Distant Sunflower Fields - Softcover

Li Juan; Christopher Payne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1838905065 ISBN 13: 9781838905064

Publisher: ACA Publishing, 2021

Synopsis

An iron-willed mother, an ageing grandmother, a pair of mismatched dogs and 90 acres of less-than-ideal farmland: these are Li Juans companions on the steppes of the Gobi Desert. Writing out of a yurt under Xinjiangs endless horizons, she documents her familys quest to extract a bounty of sunflowers amid the harsh beauty and barren expanses of Chinas northwest frontier. Success must be eked out in the face of lifes unnegotiable realities: sandstorms, locusts and death. While this small tribe is held at the mercy of these headwinds, they discover the cheer and dignity hidden in each other. But will their ceaseless labours deliver blooming fields of green and yellow? Or will their dreams prove as distant as they are fragile?

About this title

About the Authors

Li Juan is a unique voice in the landscape of modern Chinese literature, working from the margins. In 2018, Distant Sunflower Fields won the prestigious Lu Xun Award. In her dispatches, Li Juan writes about the powerful simplicity of an unconquerable landscape set against it the kindness, suffering, and strength of three women working in fragile harmony to raise sunflowers from the barren earth.

Christopher Payne has co-translated the award-winning novels Decoded and In the Dark by Mai Jia, and along with his frequent collaborator, Olivia Milburn, he’s also brought Jiang Zilong’s magnum opus, Empires of Dust, to an English-language audience. Christopher holds a PhD in Chinese literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and he has spent more than a decade teaching at postsecondary institutions, most notably Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea, and The University of Manchester in the UK. In 2020 he took up a position at the University of Toronto, where he has continued to champion Chinese literature in the English-speaking world.

Edition details

• Publisher: ACA Publishing
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1838905065
• ISBN 13: 9781838905064
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304