Wang Anyi, one of the best writers to have emerged in China in the 1980s, was born in 1954 in Nanjing and brought up in Shanghai. She was sent down to Anhui in 1970 during the Cultural Revolution and was assigned to a local performing arts troupe as a cellist. In 1978 she returned to Shanghai, where she began her career as a writer.

Like Love in a Small Town, this novelette is based on a true story of a man and a woman in the Anhui performing arts troupe to which Wang Anyi belonged. The cellist in the story, caught between his passion for his beautiful lover and his affection for his wife and children, is driven to suicide. Wang explores here the tragedy of extra-marital love in a repressive society, and reveals the strengths and weaknesses of men and women in love.