Braised Pork: A Novel - Hardcover

Yu, An

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802148719 ISBN 13: 9780802148711

Publisher: Grove Press, 2020

Synopsis

One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead. One minute she was breakfasting with him and packing for an upcoming trip, the next, she finds him motionless in their half-full bathtub. Like something out of a dream, next to the tub Jia Jia discovers a pencil sketch of a strange watery figure, an image that swims into Jia Jia’s mind and won’t leave.

The mysterious drawing launches Jia Jia on an odyssey across contemporary Beijing, from its high-rise apartments to its hidden bars, as her path crosses some of the people who call the city home, including a jaded bartender who may be able to offer her the kind of love she had long thought impossible. Unencumbered by a marriage that had constrained her, Jia Jia travels into her past to try to discover things that were left unsaid by the people closest to her. Her journey takes her to the high plains of Tibet, and even to a shadowy, watery otherworld, a place she both yearns and fears to go.

Exquisitely attuned to the complexities of human connection, and an atmospheric and cinematic evocation of middle-class urban China, An Yu’s Braised Pork explores the intimate strangeness of grief, the indelible mysteries of unseen worlds, and the energizing self-discovery of a newly empowered young woman.

About this title

About the Author

An Yu was born and raised in Beijing, and left at the age of eighteen to study in New York at NYU. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, she writes her fiction in English. She is twenty-six years old and lives in Beijing. Braised Pork is her first novel.

Review

Praise for Braised Pork:

An Indies Introduce Title

“What a singular, slippery, transfixing novel this is. An Yu achieves a hypnotizing emotional clarity as she takes her narrator ever further from a stifling life in Beijing into a watery realm unlike any I’ve read before.”―Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew

“Bold yet understated, Braised Pork is the debut of a supremely confident and gifted writer.”―Katie Kitamura, author of A Separation

“Braised Pork is mesmerizing, incisive, and utterly disarming. An Yu writes beautifully about loneliness, the experience of isolation―from others, from one’s own past―and the possibility of human connection, however fragile.”―Rosie Price, author of What Red Was

“What a voice An Yu unfurls in Braised Pork. So elegant and poised, so tuned to the great mysteries of love and loss. Like a breeze on a still day, hers is a sound I didn’t know I needed until I felt it. Braised Pork is a major debut.”―John Freeman

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0802148719
• ISBN 13: 9780802148711
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240