Part memoir and part literary nonfiction, The Women captures the harsh and unequal experience of being a woman in 1970s and 80s rural China. Written by the award winning author Yan Lianke, the book is both a tribute to the women who shaped his life and a sociological critique of China's treatment of women. "In the countryside, the human being is a worker," but rural women's work is diminished, their hardship ignored. Through humor and tragedy, Lianke shares their story and reveals a side of Chinese life rarely accessed by the West.

Yan Lianke is the author of the memoir Three Brothers and numerous novels and novellas, including Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, The Four Books, Lenin's Kisses, Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, and The Years, Months, Days. Among many accolades, he was awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature and the Franz Kafka Prize, and was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer. He was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, and he has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, and the Prix Femina tranger. He has also received two of China's most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award.