An entire month has gone missing from Chinese records. No one has any memory of it, and no one seems to care except for a small circle of friends who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that have possessed the nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn--not only about their leaders, but also about their own people--stuns them to the core.

The Fat Years is a complex novel of ideas that reveals all too chillingly the machinations of the postmodern totalitarian state and sets in sharp relief the importance of remembering the past in order to protect the future.