The Garlic Ballads, by Mo Yan (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)

A novel of China under Communism, with a rural setting but certainly no rural idyll. Chinese life is depicted mainly as brutal, bureaucratic and frequently violent, and the system of co-operative farming appears to enhance poverty and ignorance rather than to ameliorate them. The heavy hand of the police, the army and the bureaucrats lies over everything, though Mo Yan shows that family life is still extraordinarily close and is, in fact, virtually the only real guarantee of stability in this often dehumanised world. The writing has little subtlety or shading, and the narrative per se is raw and cinematic, but the book still has considerable impact on its own terms.