Excess Male, An: A Novel Maggie Shen King 9780062662552

From debut author Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male is the chilling dystopian tale of politics, inequality, marriage, love, and rebellion, set in a near-future China, that further explores the themes of the classic The Handmaid's Tale and When She Woke. Under the One Child Policy, everyone plotted to have a son. Now 40 million of them can't find wives. China's One Child Policy and its cultural preference for male heirs have created a society overrun by 40 million unmarriageable men. By the year 2030, more than twenty-five percent of men in their late thirties will not have a family of their own. An Excess Male is one such leftover man's quest for love and family under a State that seeks to glorify its past mistakes and impose order through authoritarian measures, reinvigorated Communist ideals, and social engineering. Wei-guo holds fast to the belief that as long as he continues to improve himself, his small business, and in turn, his country, his chance at love will come. He finally saves up the dowry required to enter matchmaking talks at the lowest rung as a third husband-the maximum allowed by law. Only a single family-one harboring an illegal spouse-shows interest, yet with May-ling and her two husbands, Wei-guo feels seen, heard, and connected to like never before. But everyone and everything-walls, streetlights, garbage cans-are listening, and men, excess or not, are dispensable to the State. Wei-guo must reach a new understanding of patriotism and test the limits of his love and his resolve in order to save himself and this family he has come to hold dear. In Maggie Shen King's startling and beautiful debut, An Excess Male looks to explore the intersection of marriage, family, gender, and state in an all too plausible future.

About the Author
Maggie Shen King is the author of An Excess Male (Harper Voyager), one of The Washington Post's 5 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels of 2017. She is Goodreads September 2017 Debut Author the Month. Her short stories have appeared in Ecotone, ZYZZYVA, Asimov's Science Fiction, and Fourteen Hills. Her manuscript Fortune's Fools, won Second Prize in Amazon's 2012 Breakthrough Novel Award. She grew up in Taiwan, moved to Seattle at age 16, and studied English literature at Harvard College.

Reviews
"Maggie Shen King has a great gift not only for creating a complicated, futuristic world but also for creating characters who win our hearts and minds. An Excess Male is a wonderfully inventive and wonderfully funny novel." -- Margot Livesey, author of Mercury and The Flight of Gemma Hardy "I found An Excess Male eerie and riveting. This brilliantly crafted dystopia brings to mind Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but with its dire situation more probable and imminent. An Excess Male is a wonderful read, horrifying and humorous and bringing with it a warning." -- Heather Stallings, author of Click City, a novel serialized by the San Francisco Chronicle


Awards
Winner of James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9780062662552
Author Maggie Shen King
Format Paperback
Page Count 416
Imprint Harper Voyager
Publisher HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Weight(grams) 299g
Dimensions(mm) 203mm * 135mm * 24mm