● Debut novel of Wang Yao, China's famous scholar and literary critic

● Best Novel of 2020, by Harvest Literature Magazine

● Best Novel of 2020, by Searchlight Book Reviewers' Recommendation List

● The calligraphy of the title is inscribed by Mo Yan, winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012

Folk Ballad is not only a Bildungsroman of a countryside teenager, but also a record of a village's development in transitional decades, as well as the self-renewal journey of the Chinese nation.

Dating back to 1972, the story centers on a fourteen-year-old boy Wang Houping who grows up in a poetic waterside town north of the Yangtze River. He tries to understand what is happening in the village and the complicated mindset of adults in different walks of life. He admires the revolutionary course of his maternal grandparents' family, and also attaches deep emotion to the family story of his paternal grandparents who lived in this town since ages ago. The two families represent traditions, virtues, emotional patterns and orders of China's rural area. Meanwhile, at the time of China's culture, political and social transition, Wang Houping also witnesses both his peer's cheerfully yet frustrated daily life and how progressive youth try to realize the dream to innovate local agriculture, develop modern industry and endeavor for a life of free will.

For its treatment of memory, retrospect of family history, mixture of various stylistic features and other writing skills, Folk Ballad was remarked as "working on the edges of history, memoir, essay and fiction", and breaking the boundary between fiction and non-fiction.

About the author

Wang Yao is a Chinese writer and critic, professor of School of Chinese Language and Literature of Soochow University, and distinguished professor of Chang Jiang Scholars Program. He has won the Literary Critics Award of the 7th Lu Xun Literature Prize, Chinese Literature Media Awards. He has published a variety of academic works and collections of essays such as The Eighties of A Person and Intellectuals on Paper. He is also a columnist on many journals including Southern Weekly, Reading, Harvest, Zhongshan, etc.