Books like Chronicle of a Blood Merchant
Xu Sanguan, a silk-factory worker in a small town, sells his blood whenever his family needs money, through the famine years and the Cultural Revolution.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Chronicle of a Blood Merchant
To Live
Fugui, the spoiled son of a landlord, gambles away the family fortune before the revolution, and lives on through civil war, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, telling his story to a young collector of folk songs.
The Harp in the South
The Darcys, a poor Irish Catholic family, live in a crowded terrace in Surry Hills in Sydney in the 1940s, where Roie, the elder daughter, is growing up.
A House for Mr Biswas
Mohun Biswas, born in rural Trinidad with an extra finger and an unlucky horoscope, marries into the domineering Tulsi family and spends his life trying to own a house of his own.
The Good Earth
A Chinese peasant marries an unloved kitchen slave, and across forty years of drought, revolution, and unexpected wealth they rise and the land goes on telling them what they are.
Brothers
Baldy Li and Song Gang, stepbrothers in a small town, live through the Cultural Revolution as boys and through China's wild capitalist boom as men.
Independent People
An Icelandic sheep farmer who worked for years to own his own land refuses to bend to anyone, and his family pays for his fierce independence across decades of hardship.
Palace Walk
In Cairo at the end of the First World War, the merchant al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad rules his wife and children with an iron hand at home while spending his nights in music and drink.
The Cherry Orchard
An aristocratic family's estate is sold to a merchant, and the cherry orchard they can't save becomes a symbol of everything that changes when a social order dies.
The Joy Luck Club
Four Chinese mothers and their four American daughters in San Francisco pass their stories across a bridge that the war and the immigration and the language will not let them entirely cross.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
An Irish-American girl grows up poor in early-twentieth-century Williamsburg on her mother's stubbornness and her doomed father's charm, and the Brooklyn she walks to school in is its own weather.
The Magic Barrel
Stories of poor Jews in New York and of Americans in Italy, among them the title story of a rabbinical student and the marriage broker who finds him a bride.
Paradise of the Blind
Hang, a young Vietnamese woman working in a Soviet textile factory, takes the train to Moscow to see her dying uncle, and remembers a childhood in a village torn apart by land reform.