Red Poppies - Tapa dura

Ambitious, sensuous, filled with intriguing characters, panoramic settings, and high drama, Red Poppies opens a window on Tibet, dispelling many of the popular myths of a pacifistic society peopled by devout worshipers. Red Poppies is the story of the wealthy Maiqi family: its powerful chieftain, his Han Chinese wife, his first son and heir, and his second, 'idiot' son, the novel's narrator and unlikely hero. The time is the 1930s, the setting a stone fortress overlooking all that the family rules on the arid plains of inner Tibet, with its scattered populace of peasant farmers, merchants, and comical local lamas. A feud breaks out with a neighboring chieftain; an emissary of the Chinese Nationalists comes to the Maiqis' aid with the tools of modern warfare. In exchange, fields of poppies, valuable in the Nationalist-backed heroin trade, are to be planted instead of grain in a deal that enriches the Maiqis' lavish lifestyle and earns them dangerous enmity.

Alai is an ethnic Tibetan living in Chengdu, Sichuan, the award-winning author of a number of short story collections, and the editor of China's largest science fiction journal, Science Fiction World. Howard Goldblatt is the most widely respected translator of Chinese into English. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.