A decade after Ding Village escaped poverty by mobilizing its population to sell blood, it finds itself in the throes of an AIDS epidemic as a result of needle sharing.

Bleak, yes, but you’ll be moved by the villagers’ will to survive as their world crumbles around them, and Cindy Carter’s translation renders the book’s many dream sequences in epic, flowing prose and its dialogues in terse, blunt staccato.

Dream of Ding Village is fiction, based on the author’s research, conducted in a real-life epidemic zone in Henan, and what we get is a picture of a community dealing with the consequences of its get-rich-quick scheme in near-total isolation. As social mores collapse and the afflicted gather together in a “utopian” community based in the local school, what unfolds is something between Lord of the Flies and The Magic Mountain.

Throughout the narrative, the fever flares up following the pursuit of material wealth, first by the “bloodhead” merchants driving the trade, and then by the unsuspecting villagers who fall for the scheme. When one character asks a patient in her 20s why she started selling blood, she mentions a girl whose hair turned silky-smooth after using a certain brand of shampoo: “I wanted to try it, too, but it was expensive.”

Yan’s compassion for the victims of the disease shines through, though, and his work is a fearless account of the AIDS pandemic in miniature as it tears through an isolated community.

Dream of Ding Village is available at Chaterhouse for RMB200