Beijing Coma

　　Dai Wei lies in his bedroom, a prisoner in his body, after he was shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest ten years earlier and left in a coma. As his mother tends to him, and his friends bring news of their lives in an almost unrecognisable China, Dai Wei escapes into his memories, weaving together the events that took him from his harsh childhood in the last years of the Cultural Revolution to his time as a microbiology study at the Beijing University. As the minute-by-minute chronicling of the lead-up to his shooting becomes ever more intense, the reader is caught in a gripping emotional journey where the boundaries between life and death are increasingly blurred. The result is an outstanding work of fiction and an extraordinary insight into modern China.

作者簡介

　　Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China in 1953. He is the author of Stick Out Your Tongue, which in 1987 led to the permanent banning of his books in China, Red Dust, winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2002, The Noodlemaker, and The Dark Road, a radical novel exploring the dark side of Chinese culture and the struggled faced by many as a result of the One Child Policy.