Recommendations
Books Like To Live
Best books to read after To Live by Yu Hua
If Yu Hua's devastating plainness moved you, these picks span the landscape of modern Chinese fiction and the broader tradition of novels that bear witness to catastrophic historical experience through individual human lives.
- 1Buy
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant
by Yu Hua
Yu Hua's companion masterpiece — Xu Sanguan selling his blood to feed his family through the same decades.
- 2Buy
Brothers
by Yu Hua
Yu Hua's satirical epic of modern China — from the Cultural Revolution to the chaotic market economy.
- 3Buy
Soul Mountain
by Gao Xingjian
The Nobel laureate's meditation on the same Cultural Revolution era — entirely different in method, equally searching.
- 4Buy
Border Town
by Shen Congwen
The China before the catastrophe — the pastoral world that Yu Hua's history destroyed.
- 5Buy
Red Sorghum
by Mo Yan
Mo Yan's mythic Shandong saga — the same decades of violence in a more ecstatic, fragmented mode.
- 6Buy
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The same plain testimony of survival under a totalitarian system — the Russian parallel.
- 7Buy
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman
The Tolstoyan epic of the other great totalitarian catastrophe — the Soviet experience of the same era.
- 8Buy
Wild Swans
by Jung Chang
Three generations of Chinese women through the same twentieth-century upheavals — the nonfiction counterpart.
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