The Death of Anna

The Death of Anna is a novel by the Taiwanese writer Xie Xiaoyun, first published by the Taiwan Commercial Press in 2010 and issued in a simplified Chinese edition by People's Literature Publishing House in 2017. The story takes place in S Town: the girl Anna runs away from home and goes missing, and days later her mutilated corpse is found on a desolate prairie. The two relatives who come to identify the body have never met, yet both insist the dead is their own kin—the wealthy woman Gloria identifies her as her daughter Anna, while the girl Luo Ya'an identifies her as her sister Luo Ya'en, missing for years. Officer Sullivan, who requested a transfer to S Town to forget his own tragic past, is drawn into a deeper vortex of grief by this strange case. The schoolgirl Vanessa, who loves Anna, silently followed her on the day she died and witnessed the truth, yet remains silent before the police. Anna's only friend, Hartman, the "Green Freak" who lives at the town's café, is listed by the police as a suspect and has murky ties to the town's underworld. The novel alternates among the perspectives of five people—the mother, the officer, the stalker, the sister, and the vagrant—moving back and forth between 1971 and 1991, gradually unveiling a heartbreaking mystery around one person's death; the lives of the five become entangled and each finds redemption. Suspense is the skeleton, but what the book truly writes about is how the living face loss—a work about how grief, memory, and love are rebuilt.