Inferno is the fourth novel in American writer Dan Brown's Robert Langdon series. It was published by Doubleday in May 2013, and in December 2013 People's Literature Publishing House and Shanghai 99 Readers' Culture released the simplified Chinese edition, translated by Lu Danjun and Wang Xiaodong. The story begins in an intensive care unit in a Florence hospital, where Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon wakes up on a sickbed with a head injury and fragmented memory, unable to recall why he has come from America to Italy. A young female doctor, Sienna Brooks, describes how he was brought in, but the intrusion of a woman in black and sudden gunfire cut off all explanation, and Langdon has no choice but to flee with Sienna. As the two investigate, Langdon finds in his jacket pocket a titanium tube marked with a biohazard warning, and the real answer points to genetic scientist Bertrand Zobrist and his looming Inferno project, which could change the fate of all humanity. The key to unlocking everything lies in Dante's Inferno from The Divine Comedy. Following hints in verses, paintings and architecture, Langdon and Sienna travel from Florence's Palazzo Vecchio and Vasari Corridor to the bronze horses of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice and then to the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul, evading unknown pursuers while dealing with figures from the mysterious Consortium and the World Health Organization. The novel weaves Renaissance art, ciphers and symbols, overpopulation and bioethics into a timed puzzle, asking one and the same question: when humanity's own numbers become the crisis, where exactly lies the boundary of intervening in nature?
People's Literature Publishing House publishes across classical literature, foreign literature, documentary writing and folk literature, with 492 titles in its catalogue. Representative books range from the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms to Lao She's Teahouse and Longxu Ditch in the Selected Works of Lao She, as well as translated foreign literature such as Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Dante's Divine Comedy and Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, alongside documentary and fictional works including Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and João Guimarães Rosa's The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. Its authors include Chinese writers such as Lao She, translators such as Shen Emeri and Li Wenjun, and foreign authors such as James Wood. Overall, the house has a strong record in editing classic works and translating foreign literature, with a publishing character that bridges Chinese and foreign writing and values textual quality.
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