A Perfect Crime - Hardcover

A Yi is a Chinese author born in 1976. After spending five years as a police officer, he quit to become the editor-in-chief of the bi-monthly literary magazine Chutzpah. He has written two collections of short stories, Grey Stories and The Bird Saw Me, some of which have been published in Granta and The Guardian, and he was nominated for the People’s Literature Short Stories prestigious award for Top Twenty Literary Giants of the Future in 2010. A Perfect Crime was published in China in 2011. He lives in Beijing.

Anna Holmwood translates literature from Chinese and Swedish to English. She was awarded one of the first British Centre for Literary Translation mentorship awards in 2010 and has since translated two novels, countless short stories for publication and samples for agents and rights sellers. She is currently working on a major series of Chinese martial arts novels by Jin Yong for MacLehose Press. In 2011 she cofounded the Emerging Translators’ Network to support early career translators, and was elected to the UK Translators Association committee in 2012. She lives in China.

"One of the most talked about writers of fiction in China.... What lends A Yi's writing its power is the way it is informed by his work as a policeman a career that constantly exposed him to the country's grubby underworld. In this way, the book calls to mind 19th-century French Modernists like Baudelaire and Rimbaud who shared a profound disgust for their society's conventional values, or Céline, a descendant of theirs who took their biting cynicism to a whole new level. As with A Yi, they each responded to their society's newfound industrial wealth with a contemptuous: That's all?"
Howard French in The Wall Street Journal

"Tightly crafted less a traditional catch-him-if-you-can crime caper and more a psychological probe into a pathological mind. Rather than cliff-hangers or plot twists, it’s the pulsating inner zeal of this nihilistic 19-year-old that gives the book its verve . The author’s background has provided him with rich pickings to portray China, both in the grim, claustrophobic poverty of rural life and later in the corrupt actions of the lawyers and police.... A PERFECT CRIME may be anchored in Chinese society, but its existential crisis is universal. "
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore in The Wall Street Journal

"A former police officer who writes from experience, A Yi excels in his vivid, sordid portrait of contemporary China. It's a heartbreaking tale of a rotten, alienated society fueled by greed - a nation in moral crisis."
South China Morning Post

"A terrifying, technically flawless account of moral darkness within the contemporary People's Republic, by one of mainland China's most accomplished and promising young novelists."
Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China

"Doused in blood and gushing with ethical conundrums, A Yi’s A PERFECT CRIME is a disconcerting medley of misanthropy, escapism, and media monstrosities. Woven from tales garnered in the author’s previous career in law enforcement, Yi’s psychological insights are frequently bookended by realistic renditions of urban China’s legal processes. Where Anthony Burgess sought to conjure a world of abstract flair and inexplicable cruelty in A Clockwork Orange, Yi strikes a far deeper chord, delving into the mind of a youth whose lethal motivations are abundantly and undeniably troubling.
World Literature Today

A Yi is one of the most gifted Chinese authors in recent times.”
Nobel Prize winning poet, Bei Dao

"This impressively nasty account of a motiveless murder could well be said to mark a fiendishly clever point where Albert Camus nods benignly to Bret Easton Ellis.... It is as much about the society in which it takes place as it is about the killer or the crime.”
The Irish Times

"A Yi's isolated narrator is equal parts calculating monster and forsaken victim: deserted, neglected, and ignored, he finds that his only means of feeling alive is to engender death. This austere English PEN Award winner offers an exponentially more chilling alternative to the plethora of dystopic titles; fans of Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Fuminori Nakamura, and even Keigo Higashino will surely find resonating, realistic terror here."
Library Journal

"Yi, a former police officer, is slowly rising to prominence on the literary scene in China, where this novel was published in 2011. It seems a commentary on both the culture and on the amorality and emotional detachment of one individual in it. "
Booklist