Set in a fictional town in West China, this is the story of the Duan-Xue family, owners of the lucrative chilli bean paste factory, and their formidable matriarch. As Gran’s eightieth birthday approaches, her middle-aged children get together to make preparations. Family secrets are revealed and long-time sibling rivalries flare up with renewed vigour. As Shengqiang struggles unsuccessfully to juggle the demands of his mistress and his wife, the biggest surprises of all come from Gran herself…
Yan Ge was born in 1984 in Sichuan in the People’s Republic of China, and currently lives in Dublin, Eire. She recently completed a PhD in comparative literature at Sichuan University and is the chairperson of the China Young Writer Association.
Her early work focused on the wonders, gods and ghosts of Chinese myth and made her especially popular with teenagers. The novel May Queen (2008) saw her break through as a critically acclaimed author. She now writes realist fiction, strongly Sichuan-based, focussing with warmth, humour and razor-sharp insights on squabbling families and small-town life. People’s Literature magazine recently chose her – in a list reminiscent of The New Yorker’s ‘20 under 40’ – as one of China’s twenty future literary masters, and in 2012 she was chosen as Best New Writer by the prestigious Chinese Literature Media Prize. Yan Ge was a guest writer at the Netherlands Crossing Borders festival in The Hague, November 2012, and since then has appeared at numerous literary festivals in Europe.
Her novel The Chilli Bean Paste Clan was published in Chinese in May 2013 by Zhejiang Literature Press, and been translated into German, French and several other languages. An excerpt from The Chilli Bean Paste Clan was earlier featured in Chutzpah magazine in Chinese, and in English translation here under the title “Dad’s not dead”.
Nicky Harman lives in the UK. She has worked as a literary translator for a dozen years and also organizes translation-focused events and mentors new translators from Chinese. She was Chinese-English workshop leader at the Literary Translation Summer School of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) in 2009, 2010 and 2011) and in 2011 was Translator-in-Residence at London’s Free Word Centre.
Her translations include Snow and Shadow,( 雪與影) a collection of short stories by Dorothy Tse (Muse), The Unbearable Dream World of Champa the Driver ( 裸生）by Chan Koonchung (Doubleday) and A New Development Model and China’s Future (新发展方式与中国的未来) (non-fiction) by Deng Yingtao, all released in 2014. She regularly translates for literary journals such as Asymptote and Words without Borders, and was a judge for the Harvill Secker Young Translator Prize in 2012.