St. Tianmenkou Full Three Volumes

Author: Liu Xinglong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: St. Heaven's Gate is an epic, long that Liu Xinglong completed after three revisions over six years. It takes a small town in Bieshan District as its focal point, depicting the historical turmoil of the Chinese nation in the 20th century, with profound themes and magnificent. After six years of dedicated writing, Liu Xinglong recently completed his one-million-word, three-volume novel St. Heaven's Gate. This is a rare, large-scale realistic novel in China in recent years. The novel spans from the early 20th century to the late 1960s, focusing on the fates of two families—the Xue and Hang families—in Tianmenkou, a small town in eastern Hubei. It portrays more than 50 characters, described as "the great destiny of ordinary people." The work deeply reflects the changes in national fortune and individual destiny, as well as the brilliance and baseness of human nature. Liu Xinglong, known as a fast writer in the literary world, took six years to create this long. He said, "This long has been for many years. After I started writing, I paused several times, even discarding nearly 200,000 words I had already written—it truly can be called 'dedicated writing.'" Parts of the 1.1-million-word novel have been published in magazines such as Contemporary, and it has already attracted attention from the literary critics. Some critics have remarked, "This is a work that has restructured the history of China in the 20th century."