Look Inside A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing
by Alice Evelyn Yang
Her father disappeared. He came back with the family's dark past.
For you if
you want three generations of Chinese history — occupation, revolution, aftermath — rendered through family trauma and folklore that refuses to stay metaphorical
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Qianze hasn't seen her father in eleven years — since the night of her fourteenth birthday when he disappeared without trace. When he reappears on the porch of her childhood home, older and haunted, he begins telling her stories she wasn't supposed to know: his bloody years as a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, and before that, his mother Ming's childhood under Japanese occupation in Manchuria. Yang weaves three generations of women and one traumatized man through Chinese folklore and magical realism — fox spirits, jackalopes, half-forgotten prophecies — to show how colonial violence doesn't stay in the past but manifests in bodies and dreams across generations. Deftly rendered and engrossing: integrating 20th-century Chinese history, complex family ties, and lingering traumas with controlled lyricism. The most important debut in the P&P catalog for connecting Chinese history — Japanese occupation, the Cultural Revolution — to the present through one family's haunted inheritance. Women's Prize for Fiction 2026 longlisted.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- China • East Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Chinese author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
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Why it’s here: Punk in treating banned Western novels as genuinely dangerous contraband — literature here isn't decoration, it's the thing state re-education is specifically designed to purge. Pedagogical in showing how forbidden art still gets in, and still changes people, even under total surveillance.
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
