Made my heart thump
TLS

Utterly gripping – and very necessary
Tatler

The picture of China, over a span of some fifty years, is intricate and vivid … a remarkable book
Caroline Moorehead, Literary Review

This is an epic yet intimate work that deserves to be recognised and to endure as the great Tiananmen novel … a magnificent book brim-full of humanity, insight and humour … beautifully translated by Flora Drew
Financial Times

A modern literary masterpiece … Ma Jian has created an intense, passionate and painful-to-read parable for today.. The elegant and bravura writing of Ma Jian is utterly convincing
Sunday Express

An important testimony
Mary Fitzgerald, New Statesman

Monumental... splendidly translated by Flora Drew… This vivid, pungent, often blackly funny book is a mighty gesture of remembrance against the encroaching forces of silence
Guardian

A huge achievement … a landmark account through fiction of a country whose rise has amazed the world, but which remains cloaked in shadows… finely written and translated
The Times

This landmark novel by a dissident in exile has already claimed a place as a classic work of witness
Independent

Once in a while – perhaps every 10 years, or even every generation – a novel appears that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of a country at a defining moment in its history, but of the universal right to remember and to hope. It is, in every sense, a landmark work of fiction
Daily Telegraph

This magnificent novel generously invites us to improve our understanding in many ways
Sunday Times

Simultaneously a large-scale portrait of citizens writing in the grip of the party and the state and a strikingly intimate study of the fragility of the body and the persistence of self and memory
Observer

The picture of China, over a span of some fifty years, is intricate and vivid .. a remarkable book .. the effect is extraordinarily tense, a gradual implacable build-up to disaster, matched by the equally relentless progress of the hero towards his own death
Literary Review

An important testimony, not only of the failed struggle for freedom in China, but of the tragedies and frustrations of Chinese people’s everyday lives
New Statesman

Like all the most powerful novels, Beijing Coma is deceptively simple… both profoundly poignant and unexpectedly uplifting
Sunday Telegraph

undoubtedly important novel
The Sunday Herald

This fearless epic of history and memory establishes the exiled Ma Jian as the Solzhenitsyn of China’s forgetful drive towards world domination … this is the definitive Tiananmen Square novel … For all its documentary value, this true landmark work – in Flora Drew’s engrossing translation – always grips and moves as fiction on a human scale
Boyd Tonkin, Independent

Ma Jian’s novel, which is simultaneously beautiful and full of brutality, is a blistering critique of a repressive society
Socialist Review

Epic in scope but intimate in feeling. This magnificent novel generously invites us to improve our understanding
Tom Deveson, Sunday Times

Ma Jian’s mammoth novel has the urgency of reportage partly thanks to his partner Flora Drew’s energetic translation
James Urquhart, Financial Times

A difficult but beautiful novel
Claire Anderson Wheeler, The Irish Times

This is fiction of the utmost particularity, and it is also history
Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement

A book that defines an epoch
John Kampfner, The Week