For China's Youth, A Life Of 'Darkness Outside The Night'
Xie Peng, a 36-year-old Chinese graphic novelist, spent six years working on his first book, Darkness Outside the Night. It's been praised by China's first Nobel laureate for literature, Mo Yan, as inspiring people on how to deal with life.
It's a psychological journey into the world of young Chinese: a world of competition, stress and anxiety, but not necessarily one of politics. His characters, children of the one-child generation, are anxious and alienated.
It's a world Xie knows well: He works 12 hours a day as a computer-games animator; overtime work eats up his weekends. Financial pressures bear down on him, since he married recently and bought an apartment.
Darkness is a collaboration between Xie, also known as Eliparvic Xie, who drew the pictures, and Hong Kong-based writer Duncan Jepson, who contributed the words.
"It's kind of like a Sibelius tone poem, but it was very visual. It was about anxiety; it was about frustration," Jepson says. "It was, at the same time, about seeking something better, something beautiful, something more human."