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In the early days of China's Cultural Revolution, Qing Yuan, the morgue keeper of a Beijing hospital, does his thankless duties without complaint, cleaning corpses night after night and counting the daily number of the dead. But when a nameless woman appears on his slab, brutalized beyond recognition, Qing Yuan becomes obsessed with what happened to the victim who becomes known to him simply as #19.
Soon Qing Yuan and other medical workers are accused and detained as counter-revolutionaries by Mao's Red Guards. Locked in a coal room with the accused, Qing Yuan witnesses and experiences unspeakable horrors in a fight to survive. When he's released on a whim, Qing Yuan must summon the inner strength to rebuild his life as a dunce-capped pariah and solve the mystery of what happened on the night #19 was murdered.
Written by Ruyan Meng, a political dissident of China residing the United States, The Morgue Keeper is based on real-life events. Meng's debut novel is both a Kafkaesque mystery and a survivor's testimony. Qing Yuan is a narrator readers will never forget, an ordinary man whose heroism is to simply insist on human kindness and dignity even in the most chaotic and catastrophic circumstances.
Soon Qing Yuan and other medical workers are accused and detained as counter-revolutionaries by Mao's Red Guards. Locked in a coal room with the accused, Qing Yuan witnesses and experiences unspeakable horrors in a fight to survive. When he's released on a whim, Qing Yuan must summon the inner strength to rebuild his life as a dunce-capped pariah and solve the mystery of what happened on the night #19 was murdered.
Written by Ruyan Meng, a political dissident of China residing the United States, The Morgue Keeper is based on real-life events. Meng's debut novel is both a Kafkaesque mystery and a survivor's testimony. Qing Yuan is a narrator readers will never forget, an ordinary man whose heroism is to simply insist on human kindness and dignity even in the most chaotic and catastrophic circumstances.