The Last Lover

From the sensational Chinese author who has been called a new world master, a Kafkaesque novel set in a fictional Western nation Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for fiction, presented by Three Percent, a resource for international literature [A] mind-bending novel. . . . Xue succeeds in creating a unique, immersive, tale of intersecting dreamworlds.Publishers Weekly In Can Xues extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each others fantasies, carrying on conversations that are forever guessing games. Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xues vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character is driving death away with a singular performance. Who is the last lover? The novel is bursting with vividly drawn characters. Among them are Joe, sales manager of a clothing company in an unnamed Western country, and his wife, Maria, who conducts mystical experiments with the households cats and rosebushes. Joes customer Reagan is having an affair with Ida, a worker at his rubber plantation, while clothing-store owner Vincent runs away from his wife in pursuit of a woman in black who disappears over and over again. By the novels end, we have accompanied these characters on a long march, a naive, helpless, and forsaken search for love, because there are just some things that cant be stoppedor helped.