Wolf Totem

China’s runaway bestseller and winner of the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize—now a major motion picture

Published in China in 2004, Wolf Totem has sold millions of copies (along with millions more on the black market), outpacing everything except Mao’s Little Red Book. The noveldraws on the author’s experience during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. Chen Zhen, a Beijing college student, volunteers to work in China’s remote Inner Mongolia region as part of a movement to modernize the countryside. As he admires the balanced lifestyle of the nomadic herdsmen there, he also grows fascinated by the fierce and otherworldly Mongolian wolf. But when government policies threaten the wolves’ extinction, he sees an unfolding ecological tragedy—and a parable for China’s explosive growth.