Sandalwood Death: A Novel

This novel by the 2012 Nobel Laureate, originally published in China in 2004, embodies a labyrinthine web of changing alliances and vengeance. Set during the Boxer Rebellion, the turn-of-the-20th-century Chinese uprising against Western imperialism, it features pivotal figure Sun Meiniang, who reveals in the first sentence that she will kill her father-in-law in seven days. Meiniang's husband is the town butcher whose executioner father is ordered to devise the most diabolical death (the titular sandalwood death) for Meiniang's own father—an opera singer-turned-rebel-leader—who has been coerced into surrender by Meiniang's magistrate lover. Alternately voiced by Meiniang and her four men, the narrative dovetails with passages from an opera of the same name, quickly gaining momentum toward an epic crescendo.