The Morgue Keeper (7.13 Books)

Ruyan Meng was born and educated in China. She defied her country after the Tiananmen Square Protest and Massacre and fled to the United States in 1990. She is the author of The Morgue Keeper, longlisted for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. 

The Morgue Keeper by Ruyan Meng

Born into a family devastated by the rise of Mao Zedong, the author Ruyan Meng came of age amid famine, persecution, and fear. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s branded innocents as enemies. Friends and relatives vanished overnight—sent to labor camps or lost to madness. For years, silence was a means of survival. But after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Meng’s last hopes for change were extinguished. She fled China, leaving behind everything she knew, and began a new life in the United States. Today, the rapid rise of authoritarianism around the world, with its threats of state control and political persecution, gives plenty of reason for concern here in the United States, and plenty of reason to speculate on what is soon to come. The future that Meng ventures in The Morgue Keeper, her relentless, scintillating debut novel, is unique, one drawn from historical precedent, and from experience itself. Based on true events, it offers a rare and urgently needed perspective on a society controlled by a tyrannical despot. Most powerful of all is the quiet bravery of her hero in the face of unspeakable persecution, a journey of the body and soul that is as stunning as it is shattering.