The 2011 English translation by Cindy Carter, published in the UK by Grove Press, was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

[1] It is a story based on the blood sales in rural Henan province that sparked a major AIDS crisis in China.

[3] In 2011, a film adaptation of this novel named Love for Life was released in China, which is directed by Gu Changwei and stars Zhang Ziyi and Aaron Kwok.

His original conception was for the book to be a work of non-fiction, the purpose of which was to “educate a population which knew of AIDS only as the ‘nameless fever.’”[6] Yan’s novel explores a number of perennial themes in Chinese literature, among them filicide, filial discord and unraveling, familial ethics, and bloodlines.

The so-called 'plasma economy' was the main reason for the outbreak of AIDS in Henan province during the 1990s, particularly in its impoverished remote areas.”[7] The narrative uses the metaphor of contaminated blood to convey the “collapse of a rural social order that was based on blood kinship and familial solidarity, as the traditional discourses of filial piety, marital faithfulness, and love between siblings are transgressed and subsumed by the larger socio-political context.”[8] Thus, Yan is able to make a broader political critique by way of the microcosms of the family and the rural village, exposing the ways in which these smaller social units disintegrate when traditional values are discarded for things like avarice, lust, illicit power-grabbing, and interpersonal enmity.