Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Apr 2020
240 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Beautiful, dreamlike, and utterly intoxicating, Braised Pork is the beguiling debut of an outstandingly talented young writer who is based in China but writes in English.
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.
"Yu's original debut spins an increasingly surreal tale which brilliantly mirrors Jia Jia's own discombobulation. The fish-man plotline might not fully submerge the reader in the narrative, but the lush atmosphere and fast-paced story make up for it." - Kirkus Reviews
"An draws Jia Jia with great affection and sympathy as the character grapples with the elusive meaning of her dreams and powerful emotional experiences. Readers will be moved by An's mature meditation on the often inexplicable forces that shape the trajectory of an individual life." - Publishers Weekly
"The premise itself is intriguing enough, but the real magic is in watching Jia Jia stretch her limbs as she leaves behind a rather restrictive marriage and encounters places and people she never imagined. Come for the mystery, stay for self-discovery of a liberated woman." - Literary Hub
"A startlingly original debut...While it's easy to see that Braised Pork borrows something of Haruki Murakami's brand of strange melancholia, there's a startlingly original imagination of its own at work here...A sensitive portrait of alienated young womanhood." - The Guardian (UK)
"A seductive, sharply observed tale of love, loss and hope." - Daily Mail (UK)
"An elegant, dreamlike tale of a woman's self-realization, set in contemporary Beijing." - The Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Rich and strange...Wild and distinctive." - The Observer (UK)
"Yu is a fantastic storyteller. The prose is sly and controlled, yet page after page, I found myself spellbound by a story that does what all writers hope to do, which is to make the familiar unfamiliar." - Weike Wang, author of Chemistry
"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
"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
This information about Braised Pork was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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