At the Religious Training Center on the campus of Beijing’s National Politics University, disciples of China’s five main religions gather for a year of intensive study and training. In this hallowed yet jovial atmosphere, the institute’s two youngest disciples --- Yahui, a Buddhist jade nun, and Gu Mingzheng, a Daoist master --- fall into a fast friendship that might bloom into something more. This year, however, the worldly Director Gong has organized tug-of-war competitions between the religions. Soon it becomes clear that corruption is seeping ever more deeply into the foundation of the institute under Director Gong’s watch, and Yahui and Gu Mingzheng will be forced to ask themselves if it is better to stay committed to an increasingly fraught faith or return to secular life forever.

After a service in the Army, Gao Aijun is on his way back to his ancestral village. Close to his arrival, he sees a strikingly attractive woman walking barefoot alongside a railway track, and he is instantly smitten. She is Xia Hongmei and lives up to her name of “beautiful flower.” Hiding their relationship from their spouses, the pair hurl themselves into the struggle to bring revolution to their backwater village. Emboldened by encouragement from the Party, the couple dig a literal “tunnel of love” between their homes, where their revolutionary and sexual fervor reaches a boiling point. But when their torrid relationship is finally discovered, and they have to answer to Hongmei’s husband, their dreams of a bright future together begin to fray.

In THREE BROTHERS, Yan Lianke brings the reader into his childhood home in Song County in Henan Province, chronicling the extraordinary lives of his father and uncles, as well as his own. Living in a remote village, Yan’s parents are so poor that they can only afford to use wheat flour on New Year and festival days. Yan yearns to somehow leave the village, and soon novels become an escape. In the evenings, after finishing back-breaking shifts hauling stones at a cement factory, he sets to work writing. He is ultimately delivered from the drudgery and danger of manual labor by a career in the Army, but he is filled with regrets as he recalls these years of scarcity, turmoil and poverty.

In a little village nestled in the Balou mountains, 14-year-old Li Niannian and his parents run a funeral parlor. One evening, he notices a strange occurrence. Instead of preparing for bed, more and more neighbors appear in the streets and fields, carrying on with their daily business as if the sun hadn’t already set. Li Niannian watches, mystified. As hundreds of residents are found dreamwalking, they act out the desires they’ve suppressed during waking hours. Before long, the community devolves into chaos, and it’s up to Li Niannian and his parents to save the town before sunrise.