The story takes place on the outskirts of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Beside a muddy pear field stands a boarding school for orphans and children with intellectual disabilities, which people call the "idiot school." The school grows increasingly dilapidated and short-staffed, maintaining a surface of daily order while long concealing sexual abuse, violence, and institutional indifference; the children gradually grow numb under physical and mental oppression. Eighteen-year-old Lela is the oldest child here; her body is flawed, her spine like a twisted rope, but her spirit is exceptionally strong. She does her best to protect the younger children around her, especially caring for nine-year-old Irakli, planning a way for him to be adopted by a foreign family and even teaching him English, hoping he can get out first; she herself plans to carry out a revenge afterward and then escape this mud that traps her. Yet events unfold beyond her expectations, and both her plan to save others and her own revenge deviate from what she intended. With the pear field as its center, the novel writes violence in a plain, cold style, and also uses details to depict the children's humor in hardship and their warmth for one another, portraying lower-class women's awakening and resistance in desperate circumstances while unfolding a picture of Georgia with Soviet-style architecture, South Caucasian food, and folk song and dance. This is the author's debut novel and was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
Yilin Press focuses mainly on translated foreign literature. Its current catalogue of 318 titles covers common categories such as mystery and detective fiction, foreign literature, world classics, biography, and social novels. Representative books include The Complete Sherlock Holmes 2: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, To the Lighthouse, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, and Lives of the Artists: Michelangelo, often presented in bilingual or English-language editions that serve both original-text reading and language learning. Its author resources include foreign writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Romain Rolland, as well as translators including Li Jiazhen, Gao Fen, and Ma Ye. The catalogue also includes Chinese works such as Li Jieren's Ripples Across Stagnant Water. The press shows a concentrated publishing strength in foreign classics and bilingual readers; given limited public information, this overview is based only on catalogue data.
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