Mr Muo's Travelling Couch
  • Published: 1 August 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099470182
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $26.99

Mr Muo's Travelling Couch

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Wonderful second novel from the author of the best-selling Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

Dai Sijie's bestselling and much loved first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, was a delightful fable. His second is a Chinese Don Quixote following the peripatetic misadventures of Mr Muo, China's first psychoanalyst.

It's been over ten years since Muo left China. He's been happily studying Freud in France since then. But when he hears that his first love has been thrown into a Chinese jail he rushes home to rescue her. Muo tries to bribe Judge Di but, sick of cash and cars, the judge demands that he find him a virgin to deflower instead. And so Muo embarks on a hilarious quest...

Witty, surreal, moving, wonderfully picaresque, it is packed full of stories, anecdote, incident and mishap, all resulting in a highly enjoyable satire of one innocent man's attempt to negotiate the mind-boggling maze of modern China.

Winner of the Prix Femina.
  • Published: 1 August 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099470182
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $26.99
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About the author

Dai Sijie

Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is a filmmaker who was himself 're-educated' between 1971 and 1974, and left China in 1984 for France, where he has lived and worked ever since. His first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, was an overnight sensation when it appeared in France in 2000. It became an immediate bestseller and won five prizes. It is now published in over thirty-five countries. His film of the book was chosen to open the Cannes Film Festival in 2002. His second novel, Mr Muo's Travelling Couch, became a bestseller in its first French edition.

portrait photo of Dai Sijie

Also by Dai Sijie

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Once on a Moonless Night
See all

Praise for Mr Muo's Travelling Couch

A literary road movie...veers from hilarious to horrific

Daily Mail

Allusive, intelligent, and very funny; comedy in the service of entertainment

Scotsman

Memorable and often startlingly beautiful

Scotland on Sunday

Some of the best passages are, like this, sensuous and plainly descriptive. There is a fantastic mini-essay on the aphrodisiac qualities of the sea cucumber

Toby Litt, Guardian

Unusually for a comic novel, it grips like a thriller and has some page-turningly tense moments... a significant book, as well as an eccentric one

Daily Telegraph

Well-crafted, often hilarious and surreal

Big Issue

A reading experience that evokes contemporary China with absurdist exactitude

Financial Times

An amusing, charming read with a satirical edge

Metro