Frog

Get in the xigxag app
This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.
Pre-order Buy Now £{{ price }}
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Frog by Mo Yan, read by Graeme Malcolm.


Frog is a richly complex new novel about China's one-child policy by Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2012.

Gugu is beautiful, charismatic and of an unimpeachable political background. A respected midwife, she combines modern medical knowledge with a healer's touch to save the lives of village women and their babies.

After a disastrous love affair with a defector leaves Gugu reeling, she throws herself zealously into enforcing China's draconian new family-planning policy by any means necessary, be it forced sterilizations or late-term abortions. Tragically, her blind devotion to the Party line spares no one, not her own family, not even herself.

Once beloved, Gugu becomes the living incarnation of a reviled social policy violently at odds with deeply-rooted social values. Spanning the pre-revolutionary era and the country's modern-day consumer society, Mo Yan's taut and engrossing examination of Chinese life will be read for generations to come.

'Mo Yan deserves a place in world literature. His voice will find its way into the heart of the reader, just as Kundera and Garcia Marquez have' Amy Tan

'One of China's leading writers . . . his work rings with refreshing authenticity' Time

'His idiom has the spiralling invention of much world literature of a high order, from Vargas Llosa to Rushdie'Observer

Translated by Howard Goldblatt

Critics Review

  • Harrowing, haunting, poignant . . . Mo Yan proves himself a novelist of the highest calibre

    Financial Times

  • One of China’s leading writers . . . his work rings with refreshing authenticity

    Time

  • Takes solid aim at perhaps the most notorious act of social planning the Chinese Communist Party has engineered. An expansive, fascinating cultural-political history.

    Irish Independent

  • His idiom has the spiralling invention and mytho-maniacal quality of much world literature of a high order, from Vargas Llosa to Rushdie

    Observer

  • There is no denying the ease and beauty of his storytelling . . . this is often difficult subject matter – but never hard to read

    West Australian

  • Like Kafka, Yan has the ability to examine his society through a variety of lenses, creating fanciful, Metamorphosis-like transformations or evoking the numbing bureaucracy and casual cruelty of modern governments. Deftly explores the human toll of national policy and historical forces

    Publishers Weekly

More from the same

Narrator

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.