Book excerpt: The book explores the coming-of-age fiction of two of the most critically acclaimed and frequently translated contemporary Chinese authors, Yu Hua and Su Tong; it is the first in-depth book-length treatise in English about the contemporary Chinese Bildungsroman. Although various individual contemporary Chinese novelists and individual works of Chinese fiction have previously been discussed under the rubric of the Bildungsroman, none of these efforts has approached the level of comprehensive and comparative analysis that this book brings to the genre and its social contexts in contemporary China. This book will pique the interests not only of scholars and students of Chinese and comparative literature, but also of historians and social scientists with an interest in the region.