worth reading if you can locate a copy.
I/G romance included - ne'er-do-well bashi falls in love with 12-year-old plain girl and wants to marry her.
...Set in China in the late 1970s, The Vagrants follows a group of people in a small town after the dramatic and harrowing execution of a young woman.
Writing with profound emotion, and in the superb tradition of fiction by such writers as Orhan Pamuk and J. M. Coetzee, Yiyun Li gives us a stunning novel that is at once a picture of life in a special part of the world during a historical period, a universal portrait of human frailty and courage, and a mesmerizing work of art"...