"Though this is the first of Mo Yan's novels to be translated into English, many Americans know his work from the film Red Sorghum, winner of the Silver Bear at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival. The four-chapter novel spans 40 years in rural China through flashbacks and foreshadowing, beginning with the Japanese invasion in the 1930s. Sorghum, used as food and as an ingredient of a potent wine, had been the focus and metaphor of peasant life during peacetime. In wartime, it becomes intertwined with the struggle for life. Death pervades this novel—death brutally dealt by Japanese troops, by factions within China, by crazed dog packs; death from suicide, starvation, and freezing. The strength and love of the narrator's grandmother and her lover insure the continuation of their line against all odds. But they cannot prevent the later introduction of a hybrid sorghum into their village that lacks the 'soul and bearing' of prerevolution sorghum."—Library Journal