Spring in Winter (Volume 2)

 

Following heroic victories on the battlefield, a former soldier faces his greatest challenge from the enemy within.

 

Yu Erlong, a veteran guerrilla captain of the Chinese Communist Party, returns to a remote place to confront his past. Stone lake was where he grew up in poverty on a fishing boat and then fought against the Kuomintang and the Japanese for control of his motherland. It was also the scene of the shooting of his beloved wife, Luhua. Thirty years after that cowardly murder, Erlong, with flowers in hand, is determined to find Luhua’s remains and solve the mystery of who pulled the trigger.

The second volume of Li Guowen’s award-winning Spring in Winter explores a web of personal relationships against the backdrop of four decades of tumultuous political change in China, from the civil war in the 1930s to the end of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s.

Li Guowen was born in Shanghai in 1930 and graduated from the Nanjing School of Dramatic Arts in 1949. He joined the People's Liberation Army in 1950 at the outbreak of the Korean War, serving as a writer. After returning to China, he published his first work of fiction in 1957, but was subsequently accused of being a rightist and made to work as a construction labourer. He didn't resume writing until after the Cultural Revolution had ended in the 1970s, and has since published many works of fiction, as well as poems and essays. Spring in Winter was published in 1981, and won the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Prize the following year.