Lit in Translation

Decoded

解密 · Jiemi

Mai Jia (麦家, born 1964)

Translated by Olivia Milburn, Christopher Payne

English editions

In English

* Affiliate link. As an Amazon Associate and a Bookshop.org affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases. The price stays the same for you.

Rong Jinzhen comes from a family with a strange and troubled history and has a mathematical gift to rival John Nash's. Withdrawn and cold, he plays chess with a madman and seems to live half in a dream. His talent brings him to Unit 701, the secret cryptography service, where he is set to break Purple, an enemy code of fearsome difficulty. Under huge expectations and great strain on his mind, he becomes one of the country's most celebrated code-breakers. The novel weaves his family's secret history, his genius and his strange fate into the story of one man caught in the vast machinery of the state.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form
Novel
Set in
China
First published
2002 by China Youth Publishing House
Author's age
38 when first published
ISBN

9780241961995 (Penguin Books, United Kingdom)

9781846148194 (Allen Lane, United Kingdom)

9780374135805 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, United States)

9781250062352 (Picador, United States)