Author(s): Zou Jingzhi

Novel | 2023 International Booker Prize long list | Translated fiction | China

Ninth Building is a fascinating collection of vignettes drawn from Zou Jingzhi's experiencegrowing up during the Cultural Revolution, first as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside. Zou poetically captures a side of the Cultural Revolution that is less talkedabout--the sheer tedium and waste of young life, as well as the gallows humour thataccompanies such desperate situations. 

Jeremy Tiang's enthralling translation of this importantwork of fiction was awarded a PEN/Heim Grant.

Zou Jingzhi is highly regarded in China as a fiction writer, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright.

Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright, literary translator and former International Booker Prize judge.

"A kaleidoscopic and understated collection of interlocking tales of life in an apartment building under the Cultural Revolution – the daily tedium of its inhabitants, lit by brief and tenuous moments of shared humanity." — The International Booker Prize 2023 panel of judges