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"Desolate City" is Zhou Jianing's first-person novel, which the author herself regards as the starting point of her writing. For both the characters in "Desolate City" and readers born in the 1980s and 1990s who grew up with Zhou Jianing, this story may be the final chapter of their connection with their long youth, and the prelude to their reconciliation with the adult world. Before leaving his hometown of Shanghai, the protagonist "I" in the novel worked in a cafe, met all kinds of people, and spent the last worry-free time in his life. During the three years of Beidiao, "I" had a fierce collision with society, and fell into an emotional quagmire with all the pain. Now "I" am back in Shanghai, reunited with all my former friends, standing on the edge of my thirties, entangled with two memories while saying goodbye, as if struggling to wake up from a dream. The novel delicately describes the young generation's journey of saying goodbye to their youth, and reflects the loneliness, confusion and emptiness of contemporary urban youth as they grow up.

Whether it is Shanghai today or Beijing as if it were yesterday, they both look like a deserted city. The best days ended on the night I left the cafe three years ago, and all that was left was desolation. A bizarre death reunited me with old friends I separated from three years ago. However, the lost joy is hard to recover. We are all like hollow people, trapped in our own islands, and will no longer open our hearts to each other. In the cage of memory, life falls into an infinite stagnation. Perhaps, this is the last moment of my youth, and I must say goodbye to the people and things of yesterday. Then, I will break through the stagnation of life and move towards a new beginning.

In Shanghai at the beginning of the 21st century, twenty-year-old Yangyang felt that she was out of tune with everything around her. She looked for similar people in underground literary forums, alley cafes and fringe concerts. Ten years have passed, and most of the literary and artistic young people have been consumed by useless illusions, and their lives have become dull. A small number of people have been favored by fate and achieved worldly success. Since when did life in Yangyang become more like wandering in a dark forest, no longer expecting to meet another partner. She once fell deeply in love with a natural genius, and also fell into a relationship with a famous middle-aged writer when she was most confused and lost. However, she doesn't want to be anyone's girlfriend. What she wants to be is the artist herself - facing the entire outside world alone, directly, and with a frontal attack... In this novel, Zhou Jianing uses cold and penetrating brushstrokes to outline a brief history of the spiritual wandering of literary youth in the early 21st century, with a unique melancholic temperament.