Tombstone The untold story of Mao's great famine

The most powerful book you'll read this year a passionate, angry and authoritative account of a terrible crime. 'I call this book Tombstone. It is a tombstone for my foster father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death and perhaps for myself for writing this book'. The most powerful and important Chinese work of recent years, Yang Jisheng's Tombstone is a passionate, moving and angry account of one of the 20th century's most nightmarish events: the killing of an estimated 36 million Chinese in 1958-1961 by starvation or physical abuse. More people died in Mao's great famine than in the entire first world war and yet their story remains substantially untold. Now, at last, they can be heard. Based on a vast array of new sources and personal testimonies and written by someone who was a communist party insider with remarkable access to the heart of the government, Tombstone has been banned in China and is as significant and powerful a work as Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Its publication in english will open a fierce debate around the world about the nature of a government which still presides over China and yet which has such terrible crimes in its past.