Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023

Ninth Building is a fascinating collection of vignettes drawn from Zou Jingzhi’s experience growing 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 talked about—the sheer tedium and waste of young life, as well as the gallows humour that accompanies such desperate situations. Jeremy Tiang’s enthralling translation of this important work of fiction was awarded a PEN/Heim Grant.

‘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.’ International Man Booker Judges