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Over the last thirty years Can Xue has created an astonishing body of avant-garde literature exploring the limits of the individual The vision of her idiosyncratic writing — which she calls ‘soul literature’ — positions her as a major global champion for the experimental, though her reputation in the Anglosphere has not yet reached the heights it deserves; so far, five different translators and five publishers have worked to bring her imaginative, difficult and abstract fiction into the English language Continuing a sequence that began with FIVE SPICE STREET and THE LAST LOVER (which won the Best Translated Book Award in 2015), her most recent novel, LOVE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM (recently longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize), is a metaphysical inquiry into the networks of flawed communities Through the stereoscopic tales of a group of women searching for enlightenment in an uncanny world of espionage and secrets, Can Xue stretches the dimensions of the novel, conjuring an irresistible fiction that is — like the reality in which one character finds himself —  ‘an enormous enigma within an enigma’   In her foreword, the poet Eileen Myles describes the gleaming world evoked in the novel as intrinsically female and connected, one which radically centres the experiences and histories of resilient, dangerous and insatiable women The novel plays out episodically, each chapter further untangling the crowded brocade of relationships surrounding a bordello in Western China Nothing is as it first appears: in Can Xue’s non-conformist characters, and her disregard for traditional narrative conventions, the reader is thrown into a surreal, transitional realm:   The world is in chaos! The world is in chaos! Women are vanishing off the face of the earth! When you go outside at night all you can see are black crows!   The novel is populated by sex-positive and sex-work positive women, women who look like wolves or scream like cicadas, whose bodies ‘flickered with snow-white flashes of electricity’; women who feel so lonely that ‘they burn grass on the wilderness as a way to