The Strike

As a stylist, Thomlinson aims high, with goals that recall modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia Wolfe: writers concerned with the complex juxtaposition of interior thought and external reality. The novel’s pyrotechnic language serves primarily as a window into the minds of his characters. – LA Review of BooksGround breaking and important…should become one of the most analyzed techniques in literary fiction.– Experimental WritingThis unconventional text while reminiscent of the Dadaists word games, experimental poetry, and William Burroughs’s work using cut-ups is, in the end, a unique entity unto itself…– Ray FracalossyThe Strike vividly explores a season of crisis in the lives of Old Yu and Little Xu, two outsiders in an ice-bound Chinese border town riven by an illegal strike. Caught up in the upheaval, guilt-ridden Old Yu embarks on a reckless journey to find the rebellious woman he betrayed, before it’s too late. Meanwhile, lonely young drifter Little Xu enters into a dangerous relationship with a stranger on the run.The Strike stands out as a novel that is both experimental and dealing realistically with real world events in an engaged way. The new use of syntax the novel pioneers is a method the author, a translator, uses to shake up the synapses of readers in a way that can deliver new perspectives on the nature of reality. Linguists and psychologists, literary critics and readers will find this to be a stunning new revelation of possibility.