Book Rec of the Day 4/29/2007

A slender jewel of a novel for all readers who believe in the power of fiction to transform lives. It is the Cultural Revolution in China and two educated boys are sent to a peasant village as laborers where they come into possession of a cache of forbidden Western literature and use it to free their souls and those of the villagers they tell the stories to. The Los Angeles Times Book Review calls it “an unexpected miracle.”

BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS, by Dai Sijie (Anchor, 2002)