From Gully to Wall

From a new female voice, From Gully to Wall is an expansive and poetic family saga. The literary novel deals with women’s issues in modern China. The settings – from remote village to big city – are extremely evocative, with an original premise, political undertones, and philosophical aspects.
It explores class, gender and generational attitudes. The complexity of characters draws an unbreachable divide between people, which gives a sense of realism, full of the normal vulgarities – at the same time the vivid language reads like poetry.
Zhang Lijia, author of Socialism Is Great! and novel Lotus.
A modern tale of lust, fear and greed, Heather Cai Tailian’s From Gully to Wall delves into the realities of life on the margins. Disturbing images haunt us, as they haunt the characters – a man beaten for unpaid gambling debts, a woman gangraped by loan sharks … But they are wiped away clean by the transcendental finale, set on a stretch of unrestored Great Wall. Like all gifted exophonic writers, Heather Cai Tailian’s talent for the language induces envy; and like English-language works by Xiaolu Guo and Vladimir Nabokov, From Gully to Wall introduces its own breathtaking linguistic idiosyncrasies and mutations. This is a book that delivers pleasure and pain in just the right measures.
Dylan Levi King, translator of Cai Changda’s Vessel and Jia Pingwa’s masterwork Qin Qiang.