Set in rural China under the one-child policy, Cherries on a Pomegranate Tree follows Kong Fanhua, the only female village chief in Xiushui County, as she tries to manage a local crisis.

The crisis is one that is both intimate and brutally political: a woman has fled after becoming pregnant illegally, leaving behind children, rumours, officials, family pressures, and the usual village machinery of gossip, suspicion and self-interest.

Li Er writes village life as a dense social ecosystem, where policy is never abstract because it arrives through bodies, marriages, pregnancies, paperwork, favours, debts, loudspeakers, committees, bribes, jokes, and the anxious business of everyone knowing everyone else’s business. The result is sharp, darkly funny, morally complicated fiction about power at ground level.

A strong pick for readers interested in contemporary Chinese fiction, social realism, political absurdity, rural power structures, and novels that understand how systems actually work: through rumour, obligation, petty advantage, fear, improvisation, and the occasional very inconvenient human being.

2023 Sinoist Books hardback, translated by Dave Haysom. Very good condition, with light shelf wear only. Clean, bright copy.