Mysteries don't get more surreal than Sunbirth, a marvelously dreamlike novel by An Yu (Braised Pork). The setting is Five Poems Lake, a small, remote village that feels gray, "like everything had been drawn in pencil," and has been in decline for years. Among its residents are the novel's unnamed narrator, who runs the family pharmacy, and her older sister, Dong Ji, a beauty and massage specialist at a wellness center. The village has bigger problems than grayness, however. Twelve years ago, residents woke to discover that a sliver of the sun had disappeared. "Since then, from time to time, entirely unpredictably, a little ribbon of the sun would vanish again." Half the sun is now gone. The weather is perpetually cold, even in August.
As if that weren't strange enough, residents start emitting a bright light from their open mouths, a transformation that inevitably turns each head into a vibrant sun that earns the victims the pejorative term "Beacons." This phenomenon, as readers discover in this ingeniously plotted work, has a connection to the sisters' father, a former police officer who died years earlier as he investigated two missing persons cases. Much of the plot centers on the sisters' attempts to find out what happened to their father, and whether he is somehow responsible for the village's darkness. Family skeletons, police misconduct, and more figure into the mix. Haunting and beautiful, Sunbirth is an unsettling mystery that's also a tender work about the pain of watching the degradation of a homeland one loves. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer