GREEN RIVER DAYDREAMS

The frank, unprettified voice of Heng's narrator immediately imparts vigor and urgency to this dramatic story of tragic love set in politically turbulent, early 20th-century China. A wealthy family's slave, called Ears, spins out his tale in old age, recalling his life in the Cao household in the Green River valley in 1908. The Caos' second son, Guanghan, has just returned from university studies in France along with "the foreigner" (soon nicknamed Big Road), an engineer who is to help Guanghan establish a match factory. Guanghan's modern ideas are at odds with those of his stern elder brother and his aging parents, who cannot understand Guanghan's disinterest in his upcoming arranged marriage. When beautiful bride Yunan arrives, the balance in the Cao household is further upset. Ears—who, at 17, is subject to the longings of any teenager—sees and learns much in his stealthy comings and goings around the Cao family compound. Guanghan devotes himself to new ideas—his match factory will be a workers' "commune"—and his secret experiments with explosives and long absences from the family home are stranger still. As Yunan and Big Road draw closer together, political strife looms, and Ears realizes that even in his lowly position, he may know too much to be safe—or to save those he loves. Finely crafted, with a sure rendering of time and place, this novel is both a coming-of-age story and a chronicle of the clash between forbidden love and duty. Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. (July)

Forecast:Well known among China's young emergent authors (his first novel, Jou Dou, was made into a film in 1989, and he also wrote the novella upon which the movie Red Sorghum is based), Liu Heng will establish a literary presence with this novel.