Here in a teeming Borneo rainforest full of pythons, pangolins, and monitor lizards, where crocodiles spit out rainbows and a legendary herd of elephants proves elusive, a boy searches for his uncle, leader of a once-fearsome communist brigade. Suspenseful, evocative, and full of secrets, Elephant Herd is simply extraordinary.

- Gish Jen, author of <i>Thank You, Mr. Nixon: Stories</i>,

Elephant Herd is the first time Zhang Guixing used a relatively long narrative featuring a fierce wild animal in a gorgeous, romantic, and cruel dramatic form, to imaginatively reconstruct the hidden side of the history of Chinese people in North Borneo. There is an old saying, “People rarely encounter live elephants, but if they find the bones of a dead elephant, they can use them to imagine how a live one would look.” A similar point could be made about the relationship between Elephant Herd and the history of the Chinese people.

- Ng Kim Chew, author of <i>Slow Boat to China and Other Stories</i>,

Zhang Guixing’s novels resemble an alien banner within the field of Chinese-language literature. A work like Elephant Herd is not only a rainforest romance featuring overlapping narratives of natural beauty, mysterious fate, human survival, and historical tragedy, but it also represents the author’s own distinctive perspective on and approach to world literature. These great novels grant essential nourishment to humanity’s strange square-character narratives, as well as to the pain and abundance of the stories that they tell.

- Yan Lianke, author of <i>Heart Sutra</i>,