Jia's novel: Spotlight on rural pain

Jia's latest novel Ji Hua reveals the transformation of China's rural areas through an abducted woman's story. [Photo provided to China Daily]

"Nobody knows how it goes from there－would she be beaten and disabled like many others in real life or would she try and work things out with Hei Liang," he says in a strong provincial accent.

Jia is among China's most influential contemporary writers, and his books have been translated into many languages, including English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and Korean.

Chinese Nobel-winning author Mo Yan wrote in Soochow Academic, a bilingual magazine published in Jiangsu province: "One cannot imagine any research on contemporary Chinese literature without a close study of the works of Jia Pingwa."

Ji Hua was written based on a real-life story that Jia had heard from a resident of Xi'an, in Northwest China's Shaanxi province, a decade ago.

As Jia writes in the book's postscript: "The story stabbed my heart like a knife. Each time I thought of it, I felt a deeper pain."