An Excess Male, Maggie Shen King
An Excess Male, Maggie Shen King
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An Excess Male
A Novel

Author: Maggie Shen King

Narrator: James Chen, Tim Chiou, Elaine Kao

Unabridged: 13 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 09/12/2017


Synopsis

From debut author Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male is the chilling dystopian tale of politics, inequality, marriage, love, and rebellion, set in a near-future China, that further explores the themes of the classics The Handmaid's Tale and When She Woke.Under the One Child Policy, everyone plotted to have a son. Now 40 million of them can't find wives. China’s One Child Policy and its cultural preference for male heirs have created a society overrun by 40 million unmarriageable men. By the year 2030, more than twenty-five percent of men in their late thirties will not have a family of their own. An Excess Male is one such leftover man’s quest for love and family under a State that seeks to glorify its past mistakes and impose order through authoritarian measures, reinvigorated Communist ideals, and social engineering.Wei-guo holds fast to the belief that as long as he continues to improve himself, his small business, and in turn, his country, his chance at love will come. He finally saves up the dowry required to enter matchmaking talks at the lowest rung as a third husband—the maximum allowed by law. Only a single family—one harboring an illegal spouse—shows interest, yet with May-ling and her two husbands, Wei-guo feels seen, heard, and connected to like never before. But everyone and everything—walls, streetlights, garbage cans—are listening, and men, excess or not, are dispensable to the State. Wei-guo must reach a new understanding of patriotism and test the limits of his love and his resolve in order to save himself and this family he has come to hold dear.In Maggie Shen King’s startling and beautiful debut, An Excess Male looks to explore the intersection of marriage, family, gender, and state in an all-too-plausible future.

About Maggie Shen King

Maggie Shen King is the author of An Excess Male (Harper Voyager), one of The Washington Post's 5 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels of 2017. She is Goodreads September 2017 Debut Author the Month. Her short stories have appeared in Ecotone, ZYZZYVA, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Fourteen Hills. Her manuscript Fortune's Fools, won Second Prize in Amazon's 2012 Breakthrough Novel Award. She grew up in Taiwan, moved to Seattle at age 16, and studied English literature at Harvard College.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Justine on September 24, 2022

4.5 stars A compelling and emotional read. I loved the close examination of what constitutes family, love, and happiness for the four main characters, and how wonderfully interconnected they were with each other. The totalitarian regime combined with the regressive sociopolitical views forced by the g......more

Goodreads review by Thomas on November 12, 2022

This book had an interesting premise and message though the characters left me wanting more. In An Excess Male, Maggie Shen King envisions a China where due to the One Child Policy, near 40 million men struggle to find wives and women can take multiple husbands. We follow one family where Hann, a ga......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on March 31, 2017

AN EXCESS MALE imagines what happens in a China where the One Child Policy and the preference for male children leads to a society where men vastly outnumber women but society frowns on unmarried men. In this world, women can take up to three husbands and have one child with each of them. What's so......more

Goodreads review by Jennifer on November 23, 2017

I have every incentive to procrastinate right now, yet An Excess Male wastes away by my bed, unfinished. I think I'd rather do the dishes than keep reading it, to be honest, which is frustrating because it really is a well-considered, carefully constructed, scarily plausible thought experiment. The......more