In the early days of China's Cultural Revolution, Qing Yuan, the morgue keeper of a Beijing hospital, does his thankless duties without complaint, cleaning corpses night after night and counting the daily number of the dead. But when a nameless woman appears on his slab, brutalized beyond recognition, Qing Yuan becomes obsessed with what happened to the victim who becomes known to him simply as #19.
Soon Qing Yuan and other medical workers are accused and detained as counter-revolutionaries by Mao's Red Guards. Locked in a coal room with the accused, Qing Yuan witnesses and experiences unspeakable horrors in a fight to survive. When he's released on a whim, Qing Yuan must summon the inner strength to rebuild his life as a dunce-capped pariah and solve the mystery of what happened on the night #19 was murdered.
Written by Ruyan Meng, a political dissident of China residing the United States, The Morgue Keeper is based on real-life events. Meng's debut novel is both a Kafkaesque mystery and a survivor's testimony. Qing Yuan is a narrator readers will never forget, an ordinary man whose heroism is to simply insist on human kindness and dignity even in the most chaotic and catastrophic circumstances.
