Random House reissues Nobel laureate Mo Yan's Red Shorgum

New Delhi: Following the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2012 to Mo Yan, Publishing house, Random House India announced it will be reissuing his acclaimed novel Red Shorgum in November.

Spanning three generations, the novel is about family and myth whose stories are told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty as the Chinese battle both the

Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s.

Random House India announced it will be reissuing his acclaimed novel Red Shorgum in November.

As Red Shorgum opens, a group of villagers, led by Commander Yu, the narrator's grandfather, prepare to attack the advancing Japanese. Yu sends his 14-year-old son back home to get food for his men; but as Yu's wife returns through the sorghum fields with the food, the Japanese start firing and she is killed.

Her death becomes the thread that links the past to the present and the narrator moves back and forth recording the war's progress, the fighting between the Chinese warlords and his family's history.

Mo Yan whose real name is Guan Moye was nominated along with Canada's Alice Munro and Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, Xinhua reported. The winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature was announced at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

Red Shorgum by Mo Yan will be released in paperback in November, Rs 350.

(For updates you can share with your friends, follow IBNLive on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest)