A population drugged by a brutal regime into losing their memories of a bloody government crackdown. A village decimated by a mysterious 'fever'. A Chinese Christmas tale of a retired schoolteacher who mourns the death of his daughter while pimping young girls to a seedy brothel for a quick buck.
These are just three of the story-lines to emerge from Chinese writers in translation this year. They range from Chan Koon-chung's futuristic Orwellian novel The Fat Years to Yan Lianke's Dream of Ding Village, a look at the mid-1990s blood-selling scandal and Aids epidemic, to Li Er's bleak anti-parable Christmas Eve.
They have been published during a landmark year for the consumption of Chinese literature abroad. In 2012 China will be the Market Focus country for the London Book Fair, an event that will push the country's literature onto newspaper and magazine books pages, boost copyright sales for publishers, and see more than 50 Chinese writers travel to Britain.
The book fair follows a year of celebration for Chinese literature; a country whose writers - often hindered by poor translation, censorship, and a wide cultural gap - remain behind closed doors.
This February saw Bi Feiyu become the third Chinese author since 2007 to win Asia's most prestigious literary award, the Man Asian, for his tender, sad, sometimes brutal Cultural Revolution novel Three Sisters.
In April, Su Tong (Wives and Concubines, the novella later made into the Zhang Yimou film Raise the Red Lantern) and Wang Anyi (The Song of Everlasting Sorrow) made history as the first Chinese authors nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, staking a claim alongside literary leviathans including the eventual winner Philip Roth.