A chronicle of female friendship, expressed largely through an exhaustive exchange of letters between two women who resume their long-dormant intimacy when each must grapple with the demons of middle age and unravelling relationships. Sofia, a wife and mother who leaves her mercenary, emotionless husband, and Mariana, a psychiatrist who can't help obsessing over her depressive lover, share their views on sex, politics, literature, and many other topics in a discursive, allusive correspondence and communion that is, alternately, absorbingly dramatic and painfully dull. This ambitious 1992 novel from one of Spain's leading writers (now translated into English for the first time) was a major success in Gaite's homeland, but may find a relatively lukewarm response in a culture where feisty criticisms of lamebrained machismo are not a novelty.

Lenin's Kisses is a grand comic novel, wild in spirit and inventive in technique. It's a rhapsody that blends the imaginary with the real, raves about the absurd and the truthful, inspires both laughter and tears... The publication of this magnificent work in English should be an occasion for celebration.

The award-winning novelist Yan Lianke is one of China's most interesting writers and a master of imaginative satire

Yan Lianke movingly chronicles the price that Communist China's rush to get rich has exacted from its vulnerable majority

A hugely ambitious political fable ... a great ripping yarn

Yan’s postmodern cartoon of the Communist dream caving to run-amok capitalism is fiendishly clever

Yan, one of China’s most successful writers, is still gaining attention abroad, but this story of a village that decides to buy Lenin’s corpse is Yan at the peak of his absurdist powers. He writes in the spirit of the dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich, who observed that “reality and satire are the same”

I read Lenin’s Kisses, a fierce, funny, painful and playful novel by a great Chinese writer; Yan Lianke. It is much more than just a poignant, daring political parody: it is also a subtle study of evil and stupidity, misery and compassion

This is a tale of modern China with all its wonders, marvels and absurdities and ironies roped together, making it a must-read. It’s little wonder that the author has won both China's equivalences of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Lenin's Kisses wickedly satirizes a sycophantic society where money and power are indiscriminately worshiped ... As the traveling circus gains fans across the country, it becomes clear that the officials behind the scenes, not the performers, are the true freaks

Sprawling, sometimes goofy, always seditious novel of modern life in the remotest corner of China . . . Set Rabelais down in the mountains of, say, Xinjiang, mix in some Günter Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Gabriel García Márquez, and you’re in the approximate territory of Lianke’s latest exercise in épatering the powers that be . . . A satirical masterpiece

The novel's depth lies in its ability to express an unbearable sorrow, even while constantly making the reader laugh out loud ... a truly miraculous novel

Yan Lianke weaves a passionate satire of today's China, a marvellous circus where the one eyed-man is king . . . Brutal. And wickedly funny

Lenin's Kisses shines with both the lyrical flourishes of magical realism and the keenly sharpened knives of great satire. The reader joins the inhabitants of the village of Liven as they confront the great upheavals of 20th Century Chinese history armed with both whimsy and their obsessive determination to prevail. This tale is at once breathtaking and seriously funny. Anyone who wishes to understand the psychic world-view of the modern People's Republic of China must read this fine novel.

With its distinctive language, structure and narrative approach, Lenin's Kisses presents a distictive version of 'rural china' and 'revolutionary China', even while establishing a new literary 'native China'

Yan Lianke sees and describes his characters with great tenderness . . . this talented and sensitive writer exposes the absurdity of our time

An unconventional blur of fact and fiction, How Should a Person Be? is an engaging cocktail of memoir, novel and self-help guide

A candid collection of taped interviews and emails, random notes and daring exposition…fascinating

Provocative, funny and original

A serious work about authenticity, how to lead a moral life and accept one’s own ugliness

An exuberantly productive mess, filtered and reorganised after the fact...rather than working within a familiar structure, Heti has gone out to look for things that interest her and "put a fence around" whatever she finds

A sharp, witty exploration of relationships, art and celebrity culture

[Sheila Heti] has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cant…How Should a Person Be? offers a vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western City…This talented writer may well have identified a central dialectic of twenty-first-century postmodern being

Funny…odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable…Sheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I can think of

Playful, funny... absolutely true

Sheila's clever, openhearted commentary will draw wry smiles from readers empathetic to modern life's trials and tribulations

Amusing and original