Between 1956 and 1962, Mao Zedong instigated The Great Leap Forward, with the aim that China would outdo the productivity of Britain and the US in a few years.
It was a total disaster, with millions losing their lives.
This fictionalised account of that period in Chinese history is a satire, with little humour or lightness to alleviate the grim events.
It's set in the ninety-ninth district re-education camp, close to the banks of the great Yellow River.
The majority of the prisoners are intellectuals with no experience of farming.
It's a bleak place and life is gruelling and miserable.
Lianke gives none of his characters names (which keeps them distant and undefined), but calls them by their former occupations: the Musician (the only woman among the main characters), the Author, the Theologian and so on.
They're ruled over by the Child, who is apparently a young teenager.
It's never clarified exactly.
The Child is subtle and devious and has an extraordinary knack of convincing his prisoners to do what he wants. And of course, he himself is responsible to the ''higher-ups''.
The four books of the title are a device Lianke uses to tell the story from different viewpoints; personally I wasn't convinced as to the effectiveness of this.
One of these is a kind of God-like overview called Heaven's Child; it focuses mostly on the Child.
Its style is a mix of the Old Testament and Chinese wisdom books.
It's intermingled with Criminal Records and Old Course.
Both are written by the Author, (the character, not Lianke); the first is the official viewpoint, written for the Child to take to his superiors.
The second is the Author's secret journal.
The last book, A New Myth of Sisyphus, is a single chapter at the end. We're only ever given ''extracts'' from all these books, though I'm not sure that this makes much difference to the story.
Though the book is only 335 pages, Lianke tells his story slowly, using a lot of repetition.
The telling can be obscure, and isn't always helped by the different books' approaches.
Nevertheless, much of the writing is vivid and conveys the appalling suffering of a people constantly driven to produce more and more even when the quantities promised to those in charge are ridiculously impossible.
The Four Books will reward readers who are willing to be patient with its unusual style.
• Mike Crowl is a Dunedin writer, musician and composer.
