The day the sun died

Author's name: Jan Lianke

After these cries, the ball of fire that was my father stopped advancing. It stopped for a moment; a moment equal to my father's entire life. Then it rose again, climbing over that small rise in the pool floor, and the flames swelled anew, rising higher and higher. My father did not move, nor did he cry out. He stood there, silent, surrounded by flames that devoured the twigs, grass, and clothing around him. He let the fire consume everything in its path. A huge fire blazed up in the center of the pit, at first the size of a mat, then spreading to the size of a large house. In the blink of an eye, it covered the twigs and my father, who, like a blazing column, rose toward the sky and spread all around. Blue and red flames, once they pierced the oil, turned yellow, forming a huge golden ball. And in the center of that ball stood my father, like a blazing tower at the center of the world, swaying, swaying, but he did not fall.

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A night without dawn, its hours too long to count, in which humanity's darkest desires, obsessions, and selfishness are laid bare. A somber epic where reality merges with myth, and the last glimmer of light fades. This is the tale of "The Great Night of Sleepwalking," narrated by fourteen-year-old Li Nian Nian. We accompany the boy and his father, the owner of the "New World" funeral shop, who finds himself facing a near-miraculous task: will he be able to resurrect the dead sun? Will he succeed in his desperate attempt to save the town from chaos and madness?

Through a novel in which he is a protagonist, Yan Lianke returns to us with his dark worlds, confronting us once again with profound and unsettling questions about the brutality of power, the decline of morality, and the darkness that never lifts. Yan Lianke, recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014 for his body of work, is one of the most important and prominent voices in contemporary Chinese literature. His works have been translated into dozens of languages ​​and have garnered the attention of critics and readers alike.