Brother country

If you still haven't read any forecasts for 2009 and the Year of the Ox, the novel Brothers might shed some light on the immediate future.

It is not from fortune-tellers or fung shui masters. Nor is it from astrology or horoscopes; instead it is considered a realistic and extraordinary encapsulation of modern China.

It was created by Yu Hua, one of the mainland's most highly acclaimed contemporary novelists. Brothers is the latest work of his 25 years-and-counting as a writer that has been translated into English.

Imagine a teenager making a profit from peeks at the bare bottom of a well-known beauty in a little town and later becoming a multimillionaire through collecting scrap. Consider a multimillionaire confessing a miserable story about how he can never meet an honest-to-goodness virgin, attracting mountains of letters from self-avowed maidens professing their undying devotion.

Then, imagine that dilemma inspiring an Inaugural National Virgin Beauty Competition and leading to the invention of a hymen reconstruction surgery industry. This is the bizarre but daily life of Yu's two fictional brothers, Baldy Li and Song Gang, as their fortunes rise and fall across the decades.

Brothers was first released in two volumes in 2005 and 2006 and was well-received on the mainland with more than a million copies sold. A story of stepbrothers and the woman who comes between them, Brothers is a surreal but somehow believable tale set against the brutality and violence of the Cultural Revolution and the shock of the later economic boom. It examines family feuds and the conventional ties that bind, as well as free Chinese running amok in modern China.