STRANGE BEASTS OF CHINA is a book that must be read in order to be believed. PEN Award-winning novelist Yan Ge, one of the most exciting voices in contemporary Chinese literature, finally has been translated into English. Her broad strokes and flights of fancy highlight a world to escape into that will engage all your senses with its innovation and imagination and leave you emotionally changed as you finish the last page.

“According to the legends, there were heartsick beasts in ancient times too. When their masters passed away, they ran head first into a wall and died. Today there may be masters of knowledge who have invented heartsick beasts, but these beasts are not truly heartsick --- rather, they were manufactured to serve humans.” In Yong’an, a fictional Chinese urban metropolis, we meet our narrator, an amateur cryptozoologist who is hired to uncover the stories of the city’s fabled beasts. Living amidst the humans, they operate under a very particular system in which they can intermingle and breed with people but not with each other. They have green skin, serrated earlobes, strange birthmarks and individual tales of adventures on this planet that are as varied as they are.

"Like Kazuo Ishiguro’s NEVER LET ME GO, STRANGE BEASTS OF CHINA creates a thoughtful and introspective look at the results of our earthly need to expand species and play God with all things living.... This engaging mystery masquerades as a sci-fi/thriller hybrid that is so much more."

With the help of her former professor and his less-than-trustworthy assistant, the narrator takes on the job of documenting each beast. In investigating this particular group of citizens, she is drawn, little by little, into a mystery that threatens her very identity and how she thinks about her own life.

“I sat down to write the story of the flourishing beasts, imagining the narrator as one of them. ‘I died before I was born,’ I had her say. ‘I was hacked into pieces and turned into a chair. My limbs were ripped apart, my entrails mutilated. One day a man bought me for a lot of money. Because he wanted me. He placed me by his bed but couldn’t bear to sit on me, so instead he gazed at me and talked, touching my face and kissing me. My heart was still tender.’” Treated like part person, part product, the beasts are subjected to all sorts of outcomes. From this, the narrator begins to see the larger existential questions of identity, humanity, love and morality in a story that grows in mysteries both profound and surprising, terrifying and heartwarming.

STRANGE BEASTS OF CHINA is a treatise on life itself and how humanity changes as we move forward into an age when our strange predilection for hybrid, combining different beings into a new composition, starts to take greater shape. But it is not in itself a condemnation of experimentation but rather the journey that all sentient beings are on to understand their place in a complicated world.

Ge’s style, as translated by Jeremy Tiang, feels very much like the verbiage and vivacious search for truth that Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett put to paper for their classic noirs. Our narrator is a plainspoken and honest voice that juxtaposes her subjects for maximum effect. The beasts are given multidimensional elements that engage the reader with both whimsy and high emotion in equal measure. Ge’s worldbuilding is sparse but effective, the language again giving us just enough information to form vivid pictures in our minds that we won’t soon forget.

Like Kazuo Ishiguro’s NEVER LET ME GO, STRANGE BEASTS OF CHINA creates a thoughtful and introspective look at the results of our earthly need to expand species and play God with all things living. As we look at the gigantic repercussions of climate change and the inventiveness of stem cell research and other such medical miracles, this is a book that reminds us that the most important part of our moving forward on this planet is love and tolerance, self-expression and caring. This engaging mystery masquerades as a sci-fi/thriller hybrid that is so much more.