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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > A Perfect Crime

A Perfect Crime

On a normal day in provincial China, a bored high-school student goes about his regular business. But he’s planning the brutal murder of his only friend, a talented violinist. He invites her round, strangles her, stuffs her body into a washing machine and flees town. On the run and without remorse, the student is initially anxious, but having outsmarted the authorities the allure of danger soon takes hold again. Alerting the police to his whereabouts, the cat-and-mouse game begins anew with the stakes rising to ever-higher levels.

A Perfect Crime is both a vision of China’s heart of darkness – the despair that traps the rural poor and the incoherent rage lurking behind their phlegmatic front – and a technically brilliant excursion into the claustrophobic realm of classic horror and suspense. A Yi steadily reveals the psychological backstory that enables us to make sense of the story’s dramatic violence and provides chillingly apt insights into the psychology behind a murder committed simply as an intellectual challenge to relieve the daily tedium of existence.

Author

A Yi

A Yi

Books

A Perfect Crime

A Yi is a Chinese author born in 1976. After spending five years as a police officer, he quit to become the editor-in-chief of the bi-monthly literary magazine Chutzpah. He has written two collections of short stories, Grey Stories and The Bird Saw Me, some of which have been published in Granta and the Guardian. He was nominated for the People’s Literature Short Stories prestigious award for Top Twenty Literary Giants of the Future in 2010. A Perfect Crime was published in China in 2011. He lives in Beijing.

Translator

Anna Holmwood

Anna Holmwood

Books

A Perfect Crime

Anna Holmwood translates literature from Chinese and Swedish to English. She was awarded one of the first British Centre for Literary Translation mentorship awards in 2010 and has since translated novels, countless short stories for publication and samples for agents and rights sellers. She is currently working on a major series of Chinese martial arts novels by Jin Yong for MacLehose Press. In 2011 she co-founded the Emerging Translators’ Network to support early career translators, and was elected to the UK Translators Association committee in 2012. She lives in China.

Published by

Oneworld Publications, 2015
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On a normal day in provincial China, a bored high-school student goes about his regular business. But he’s planning the brutal murder of his only friend, a talented violinist. He invites her round, strangles her, stuffs her body into a washing machine and flees town. On the run and without remorse, the student is initially anxious, but having outsmarted the authorities the allure of danger soon takes hold again. Alerting the police to his whereabouts, the cat-and-mouse game begins anew with the stakes rising to ever-higher levels.

A Perfect Crime is both a vision of China’s heart of darkness – the despair that traps the rural poor and the incoherent rage lurking behind their phlegmatic front – and a technically brilliant excursion into the claustrophobic realm of classic horror and suspense. A Yi steadily reveals the psychological backstory that enables us to make sense of the story’s dramatic violence and provides chillingly apt insights into the psychology behind a murder committed simply as an intellectual challenge to relieve the daily tedium of existence.

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