Hungry times

A man searching for cabbage finds he is pulling at a frozen corpse. Offered a bowl of hot water, he discovers a boiled baby curled up inside. Snapshots from the landscape of starvation cram My Bodhi Tree (Secker & Warburg, £10, ISBN 0 436 20325 1), the Chinese poet Zhang Xianliang’s sequel to his bestselling Grass Soup. Here, Zhang covers one year out of the 22 he spent as a political prisoner: 1960, when Mao Tse-tung’s policies triggered a famine claiming 30 million lives. A brilliant study of the psychology of survival, the book shows, too, how hunger dehumanised an entire generation, kickstarting the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution and after.