Mo Yan creates a beautiful expression of the value of human life

Book review of: 'Frog' by Mo Yan, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt, Hamish Hamilton, 2014. Original title 'Wa', a story about China's one-child policy: 'Fertility, exponential possibility and a profusion of frogs: these are the markers of Mo Yan's historically driven, deeply personal prose, which saw the Chinese writer recognised with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012. Frog is his first novel translated into English since then, though readers of Red Sorghum, along with several other of his works that have found wide Western readerships, may already be familiar with his irreverent style, which brings a familial lens to political issues'.