Frog is a richly complex new novel about China"s one-child policy by Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2012. Gugu is beautiful, charismatic and of an unimpeachable political background. A respected midwife, she combines modern medical knowledge with a healer"s touch to save the lives of village women and their babies. After a disastrous love affair with a defector leaves Gugu reeling, she throws herself zealously into enforcing China"s draconian new family-planning policy by any means necessary, be it forced sterilizations or late-term abortions. Tragically, her blind devotion to the Party line spares no one, not her own family, not even herself. Once beloved, Gugu becomes the living incarnation of a reviled social policy violently at odds with deeply-rooted social values. Spanning the pre-revolutionary era and the country"s modern-day consumer society, Mo Yan"s taut and engrossing examination of Chinese life will be read for generations to come. "Mo Yan deserves a place...