A BEAST SLINKS TOWARDS BEIJING

This dazzling, magical realist historical novel follows three generations of a northern Chinese family, beginning in present-day NYC with an estranged father's sudden reappearance in his daughter's life.

Qianze, a Chinese American woman from the South, has not heard from Ba since he walked out on her and her mother eleven years ago. The man who shows up on her doorstep is deeply changed, struggling with dementia and alcoholism, but he has found his way back to her to deliver a warning prophecy - only he's forgotten it. As Qianze resentfully takes Ba in, attempting to unspool the mystery of his decade-long absence, Ba tumbles into harrowing childhood memories of his time in the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, when he was a young boy named Weihong. The story zooms backward in time to Ba's childhood and that of his mother, Qianze's grandmother. Ming, who grew up in rural Manchuria during the Second Sino-Japanese War and Japanese occupation, is kidnapped and made to be a comfort woman for the Japanese Kwantung Army. There, she encounters an inhuman creature who irrevocably alters Ming's family's fate, with reverberations that Qianze and Ba can confront only by reconciling with each other. Alice Evelyn Yang is a Chinese American writer from Norfolk, Virginia. Her work has been published in MQR, AAWW's The Margins, and The Rumpus, among others. Her work has been sponsored by Tin House Workshops, and she is the recipient of the 2022-23 Jesmyn Ward Prize from MQR. She completed her MFA in Fiction in 2022 at Columbia University, where she was awarded the Felipe De Alba Fellowship and nominated for the Henfield Prize. She currently works as a Speakers Representative at the Blue Flower Arts speaker agency. https://www.aliceevelynyang.com/