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Virals
Virals
Jul 18, 2025 12:54 AM

Author:Kathy Reichs,Cristin Milioti

Virals

Fourteen-year-old Tory Brennan is as fascinated by bones and dead bodies as her famous aunt, acclaimed forensic anthropologist, Tempe Brennan. However living on a secluded island off Charleston in South Carolina there is not much opportunity to put her knowledge to the test. Until her and her ragbag group of technophile friends stumble across a shallow grave containing the remains of a girl who has been missing for over thirty years. The question is, did whoever was responsible for the girl's death have anything to do with the sick puppy they rescued from a secret laboratory on the same island?

With the cold-case murder suddenly hot, Tory realises that they are involved in something fatally dangerous. But events take a turn for the bizarre when they escape some would-be attackers by using physical powers more akin to a dog than a human... Could the puppy hold the key not only to the murder, but also the strange changes that are taking place in their bodies?

Reviews

If you like the TV series Bones then you'll love Virals.

—— James Patterson

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.

—— Ha Jin, author of Waiting

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

—— Isabel Hilton , Guardian

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

—— Spectator

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

—— Xiaolu Guo , Independent

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

—— New York Times Book Review

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”

—— Evan Osnos , New Yorker, Best Books of 2012

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

—— Amos Oz, New York Times

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.

—— Da Chen, author of My Last Empress

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

—— Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore , Wall Street Journal

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

—— Kirkus Reviews

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

—— Ming Pao Weekly (Hong Kong)

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

—— L'Express

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.

—— Vincent Lam, author of The Headmaster's Wager

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'

—— Contemporary Literature Commentary

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

—— La Croix

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

—— Grazia

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

—— Sinead Gleeson , Irish Times

Provocative, funny and original

—— Hannah Rosefield , Literary Review

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

—— Richard Godwin , Evening Standard

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

—— Lidija Haas , Times Literary Supplement

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

—— Natasha Lehrer , Jewish Chronicle

[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

—— James Wood, New Yorker

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

—— New York Times

Playful, funny... absolutely true

—— The Paris Review

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

—— Eve Commander , Big Issue in the North

Amusing and original

—— Mail on Sunday
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