Wuhan

As rumours of a strange new illness in Wuhan spread via social media in China, 25-year-old citizen reporter Kcriss decides to travel to the epicentre of the disaster to try to find out what is really going on. He sees an ad for corpse carriers at a funeral home – Male or female, 16-50 years old, unafraid of ghosts - and decides to apply. He quickly realises that the official death figures bear no relation to what is happening in the local crematoria. But the brief moment when he can tell the truth to his followers on social media is soon over: he is discovered, followed and arrested by the security police – all documented live on the internet.

In this startlingly topical documentary novel, Liao Yiwu takes us into the heart of the crisis that unfolded in Wuhan and unpicks the secrecy and cover-up that surrounded the outbreak of the public health emergency that ravaged the world. Where did the virus come from and what happened in Wuhan? Protocols are buried and new lies cement the story of the party's heroic victory - propaganda that poisons people like the virus.

Also available as an audiobook. To the Reader

Prelude: The Intruder

Chapter 1: A City Forced to Close
Chapter 2: A Viral Prison of French Origin
Chapter 3: Who’s Eating the Bats?
Chapter 4: Li Wenliang is Gone, The Truth is Dead
Chapter 5: Daily Life in Isolation
Chapter 6: An Asymptomatic Spreader
Chapter 7: Passing through No-man’s Land
Chapter 8: On Two Sides of the Border
Chapter 9: The Virus Leaves the Country
Chapter 10: Scientists Against ""Conspiracy Theories""
Chapter 11: Unrestricted Warfare
Chapter 12: His Imperial Majesty Arrives
Chapter 13: An Illegal Border Crosser Goes Home
Chapter 14: The Republic of Disappeared People – A Hitchcock Mystery
Epilogue: Wuhan Elegy

Appendices
How was Wuhan written?
The Blank Paper Revolution
History will Remember this Unprecedented Shout of Anger
Poem: My Sole Weapon is Spit
The Spirits of the Boundless Departed have Opened and Closed this Book: Thanks to the friends who participated in creating it

“If you want to know how little a human life counts in China's dictatorship, you must read this book.”
Herta Müller, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature

“Liao Yiwu is a writer of tremendous courage and honesty. His writings, deeply humane, sparkle with humour and sharply observed details. A bleak world often becomes funny, even poetic, under his pen.”
Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans

“Liao Yiwu combines deep research with extraordinary imaginative skills to counter the Communist Party's efforts at erasing the outbreak of the deadly coronavirus in Wuhan. A vital, compelling read.”
Ian Johnson, Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations

“Liao Yiwu’s Wuhan combines fiction, non-fiction, and his own kind of journalism to produce a fever dream of a book, exploring and exploding the Wuhan lockdown following the outbreak of the Coronavirus in China in 2020. As a dissident living in exile, Liao’s focus is consistently on those who attempt to tell the truth in China, as well as on the state agents committed to stopping the truth-tellers, jailing and even killing them on occasion, as Liao brilliantly illustrates with reference to dissidents from other times and places, showing that Wuhan was in no way an exception. Told in Liao’s inimitable style, the book is a monument to the human refusal to yield to state power.”
David Ownby, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

"extraordinary"
Mark Honigsbaum, The Observer

"testament to the importance of literary memory… Liao connects the effort to document truth in the teeth of repression to other places and histories, while shades of Elie Wiesel and Solzhenitsyn haunt his account of vanishing truth tellers."
Isabel Hilton, Prospect

“compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand the black comic absurdity of the initial response to COVID-19, the courage of Chinese citizens determined to speak for truth, and the tragic price they can pay for it.”
Sydney Morning Herald

Liao Yiwu is a Chinese writer living in Berlin.