Autumn in Peking

The Exopotamian desert is a place where hepatrols blossom and children gather small creatures called sandpeepers. The sun behaves oddly there. It leaves eerie black zones across the sand, and nothing in the book explains what they are.

This is a surreal novel in which invented plants, animals and places are treated as ordinary. Boris Vian builds the setting out of his own language, and the strangeness of the prose shapes the fiction as much as any plot does. Despite the title, the story takes place neither in autumn nor in China.

The book is the fourth novel by Vian, a contemporary of Sartre and Beauvoir. It first appeared in French in 1947, and Paul Knobloch translates it into English. A foreword by Marc Lapprand guides readers into its logic.

Expect a playful, odd and unsettling read that asks for patience with its invented vocabulary. The pleasure lies in the inventive style and the desert's unexplained mysteries. Vian's experimental writing found its main success in the sixties and later made him an icon of the May 1968 student movement.