Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for fiction, presented by Three Percent, a resource for international literatureIn Can Xues extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each others fantasies, carrying on conversations that are forever guessing games. Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xues vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character is driving death away with a singular performance.