During China's collectivist era in the late 1950s, a rural work team building an important floodgate receives a strange new recruit: Hei-hai, a skinny, silent and almost feral boy. Hei-hai proves superhumanly indifferent to pain or suffering and yet, eerily sensitive to the natural world. As the worksite becomes a backdrop to jealousy and strife, Hei-hai's eyes search for wonders that only he understands. One day, he finds all that he has been seeking embodied in the most mundane and unexpected way: a radish.

All Editions

Paperback, 4th Edition

ISBN13: 9780734310798

Penguin Books UK, 2016

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