A Drifting Downpour

Youth is a poem, and the passing years a painting. With the protagonist's tangled love life at its heart, this novel recreates the changes in urban and rural life during the deepening of reform through the fates of different people and the rise and fall of different industries: the implementation of family planning, the migrant-worker boom, the wave of layoffs, the stock market's glory and disasters, the property market's birth and the bursting of its first bubble, the chance and inevitability behind the rise of the first to get rich, and the living conditions and shifting values of people at the bottom of society.