Xiao Guang was a young boy when the woman known to him as Third Aunt married into his family. It was the early 1960s and China had just experienced a period of unprecedented famine. It wouldn't be long before the beginning of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution, a decade of instability during which violence was rife, food continued to be scarce and all kinds of rumours took hold...

The Wolf and the Whistler, Mo Yan's first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a stunning portrait of one woman's life set against one of the most convulsive periods in modern Chinese history.