One morning in autumn, just after breakfast, Jia Jia finds her husband dead in the bathtub of their Beijing apartment. Next to him is a piece of folded paper, a sketch of a strange creature from his dream. He has left her no other sign.
Young, alone, and with many unanswered questions, Jia Jia sets out on a journey. Starting at her neighborhood bar, fueled by anger, bewilderment, curiosity and love, she travels from nocturnal Beijing to the high plains of Tibet, deep into her past in order to arrive at her future.
Cinematic, often dreamlike, Braised Pork is an exploration of myth-making, loss, and a world beyond words, which ultimately sees a young woman find a new and deeper sense of herself.
Published in 2020 by Harvill Secker and Grove Atlantic
“A startlingly original debut . . . While it’s easy to see that Braised Pork borrows something of Haruki Murakami’s brand of strange melancholia, there’s a startlingly original imagination of its own at work here . . . A sensitive portrait of alienated young womanhood.”
“Her novel has a cool, poised elegance that only adds to its enigmatic allure.”
“Strange and cinematic, this is an author to keep an eye on.”
“What a voice An Yu unfurls in Braised Pork. So elegant and poised, so tuned to the great mysteries of love and loss. Like a breeze on a still day, hers is a sound I didn’t know I needed until I felt it. Braised Pork is a major debut.”
“Bold yet understated, Braised Pork is the debut of a supremely confident and gifted writer.”
“Rich and strange . . . Wild and distinctive.”
“This exquisite novel is many things: a detective story in which the real object of pursuit is how one makes meaning of a sometimes ineffable existence; a meditation on the talismanic power of art and the indefatigability of the human spirit; and a many-faceted, perfectly cut gem of psychological portraiture set in well-wrought sentences burnished to a gorgeous luster. The emotions in this book keep pace with you, shadowing you with a quiet intensity, until in the last stretch they overtake you completely.”
“A seductive, sharply observed tale of love, loss and hope.”
“An elegant, dreamlike tale of a woman’s self-realization, set in contemporary Beijing.”
“Yu is a fantastic storyteller. The prose is sly and controlled, yet page after page, I found myself spellbound by a story that does what all writers hope to do, which is to make the familiar unfamiliar.”
“Braised Pork is mesmerising, incisive and utterly disarming. An Yu writes beautifully about loneliness, the experience of isolation — from others, from one’s own past — and the possibility of human connection, however fragile.”
“What a singular, slippery, transfixing novel this is. An Yu achieves a hypnotizing emotional clarity as she takes her narrator ever further from a stifling life in Beijing into a watery realm unlike any I’ve read before.”