Shen Fuyu was born in Jiangsu, China in 1970. At the age of 18, he left home and drifted around the country, taking up a variety of jobs--porter, clerk, and schoolteacher--and began his writing career. He graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of Nanjing University in 1996, and has been working as a journalist for 20 years. Having published more than a dozen books, Shen is a full-time writer now and lives in Paris.
[Shen Fuyu's] prose is steeped in contagious nostalgia, and he employs the universal language of emigration and exile, writing, 'I am now an orphan, lost in the big city.' -Farah Abdessamad, The Atlantic Beautifully written, with an almost mythic tone, each of these vignettes captures a piece of village life and custom during a tumultuous century in Chinese history. -Booklist A Marcel Pagnol of provincial China in a beautifully accessible translation. -Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review