Fresh tracks

IT'S NEARLY 400 pages of stories about wolves, and peppered with sentences that start like this: 'As for the Northern Wei dynasty ...'

So why has the best-selling novel Wolf Totem sold 610,000 copies on the mainland since May last year, and why was it a gift of choice for both government officials and fancy corporations during this Lunar New Year?

The answer, suggests the book's Beijing publisher, An Boshun, lies in its message of freedom.

'People desire freedom,' says An, a tall, rangy man dressed in blue jeans and a publisher's brown cardigan with patched elbows. An, chief editor at Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House, one of the mainland's best-known literary publishers, is sitting at his computer in the company's offices in an apartment complex in northern Beijing. He toys with a red, Double Happiness cigarette packet, occasionally pulling out a cigarette and lighting it, then striding to a window to wave out the smoke.

'Wolves are free,' he says. 'However many tens of thousands of years of history we humans have been through, we still have animal genes inside us. And genes don't evolve that fast. So I think our desire for freedom is absolutely inborn. Chinese people have been oppressed and insulted for too long by their officials, and this book touches a chord in us - we want the freedom that wolves have, that wolves have always had.'

'It isn't letting up,' says An, pointing excitedly to February sales lists from each of Beijing's two biggest book shops, where Wolf Totem is selling between 300 and 400 copies a week.