In 1900, as the Boxer Rebellion rages in China, baby Shanggüan Lu is hidden in a flour vat while her parents are slain by invading German forces. Ninety-three years later, having survived the Japanese occupation, the civil war, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, she dies in the care of her only son, a boy addicted to his mother's milk. The story of an indestructible woman in a land brought to its knees by waves of war, famine and communism, by weak men, bandits and bureaucrats, philandering missionaries and hen-murdering midwives, Big Breasts and Wide Hips is a searing, satirical vision of China in the twentieth century. Resplendently grotesque, bristling with grim humour, exhuberant in its treatment of sex, violence, politics and death, it confirms Mo Yan as the greatest Chinese author of his generation.