What i admire most is Su Tong's style ...delicate yet bizarre. His strokes are restrained but merciless. He is a true literary talent.

Su Tong writes beautiful, dangerous prose.

For RAISE THE RED LANTERN, 'A remarkable story, subtle and profound'

Sensual and tragic

Su Tong's evocation of one family's destiny in 1930s China is stark and vivid in the extreme. A chilling and macabre tale, characteristically told with imagination and unflinching honesty

For MY LIFE AS EMPEROR: Su Tong's Xie Empire is a dreamlike, beautiful, brutal place ...his prose is full of gorgeous images

Praise for RICE: Su Tong has fashioned a cruel, heartrending and enormously passionate assault on the traditions of the Western novel. There's no love here; no redemption, no triumph of the individual. Unless you count the triumph inherent in Su Tong's overwhelming imaginative virtuosity

Breath-taking ... Su Tong renders these people so vividly they possess of us, the individuality that they deny one another

Scorching ...spinning a plot featuring blackmail, adultery, incest and scandal, Su Tong creates visceral drama that moves rapidly in Goldblatt's fluid translation

A riveting melodrama ... page by page, the novel stuns us with a sequence of hallucinatory, disturbing inventions ...Balzac and Zola would have recognized a kindred spirit in Su Tong

These are stories that will sneak into the back of your brain and lurk there long after you are finished reading.

Poignant and wonderful story...concentrates, without effort, all Malouf's themes...it needs to be read