Braised Pork

An elegant, dreamlike tale of a womans self-realisation in contemporary Beijing. Yus writing has an arresting, unadorned lyricism * Daily Telegraph * A seductive, sharply observed tale of love, loss and hope that moves from high-rise Beijing to rural Tibet and the mysterious, magical world of water -- Fanny Blake * Daily Mail * A startlingly original imagination... Braised Pork is a sensitive portrait of alienated young womanhood as it is set free * Guardian * Rich and strange Braised Pork is a debut that gets under your skin -- Anthony Cummins * Observer * Braised Pork is mesmerising, incisive and utterly disarming. An Yu writes beautifully about loneliness, the experience of isolation from others, from ones own past and the possibility of human connection, however fragile. * Rosie Price * So elegant and poised, so tuned to the great mysteries of love and loss. Like a breeze on a still day, An Yus is a voice I didn't know I needed until I felt it. Braised Pork is a major debut * John Freeman * Bold yet understated, Braised Pork is the debut of a supremely confident and gifted writer. * Katie Kitamura * What a singular, slippery, transfixing novel this is. An Yu achieves a hypnotizing emotional clarity as she takes her narrator ever further from a stifling life in Beijing into a watery realm unlike any I've read before. * Idra Novey * Yus novel has a cool, poised elegance that only adds to its enigmatic allure * Economist * A dizzying read An Yu writes with style and in a way that is hard to resist -- Lucy Knight * Sunday Times * Richly associative, the books imagery insinuates itself into the readers consciousness long after its finished -- Jude Cook * Spectator * This exquisite novel is many things: a detective story in which the real object of pursuit is how one makes meaning of a sometimes ineffable existence; a meditation on the talismanic power of art and the indefatigability of the human spirit; and a many-faceted, perfectly cut gem of psychological portraiture set in well-wrought sentences burnished to a gorgeous luster. The emotions in this book keep pace with you, shadowing you with a quiet intensity, until in the last stretch they overtake you completely. * Matthew Thomas * What a singular, slippery, transfixing novel this is. An Yu achieves a hypnotizing emotional clarity as she takes her narrator ever further from a stifling life in Beijing into a watery realm unlike any I've read before. * Idra Novey * Bold yet understated, Braised Pork is the debut of a supremely confident and gifted writer.' * Katie Kitamura *

An Yu was born and raised in Beijing, and left at the age of eighteen to study in New York at NYU. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, she writes her fiction in English. She is twenty-six years old and lives between Paris and Hong Kong. Her debut novel, Braised Pork, was published by Harvill Secker in 2020.