My Bodhi Tree

THE BOOK: 'A man searching for a cabbage finds he is pulling at a frozen corpse. Offered a bowl of hot water, he discovers a boiled baby curled up inside. Snapshots from the landscape of starvation cram My Bodhi Tree, the Chinese poet Zhang Xianliang's sequel to his bestselling Grass Soup. Here, Zhang covers one year out of the 22 he spent as a political prisoner : 1960, when Mao Tse-tung's policies triggered a famine claiming 30 million lives. A brilliant study of the psychology of survival, the book shows, too, how hunger dehumanised an entire generation, kickstarting the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution and after'. - New Scientist.