Of all the brief lives I’ve inhabited, humans are definitely the most interesting. Poetry and painting, literature and drama, song and dance; there’s nothing they can’t do.

As I fell into this young creature named Ding Yi, a life filled with hardship, love and betrayal unfolded before me.

I’ll try to make this account as entertaining as possible, but please bear with me – it was several lifetimes ago.

My Travels in Ding Yi is an epic novel told from the perspective of a nomadic spirit named Shi who inhabits a Chinese boy living in the second half of the 20th century. Shi describes coming of age during the Cultural Revolution in language that dips and soars from crude to lyrical, often in a single breath. Unpredictable and engrossing, this contemporary classic of Chinese fiction was first published in 2006 and is now available in English for the first time.