An Excess Male

A Novel

By: Maggie Shen King

Narrated by: James Chen, Tim Chiou, Elaine Kao

From debut author Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male is the chilling dystopian tale of politics, inequality, marriage, love, and rebellion, set in a near-future China, that further explores the themes of the classics The Handmaid's Tale and When She Woke.

Under the One Child Policy, everyone plotted to have a son. Now 40 million of them can't find wives.

China’s One Child Policy and its cultural preference for male heirs have created a society overrun by 40 million unmarriageable men. By the year 2030, more than twenty-five percent of men in their late thirties will not have a family of their own. An Excess Male is one such leftover man’s quest for love and family under a State that seeks to glorify its past mistakes and impose order through authoritarian measures, reinvigorated Communist ideals, and social engineering.

Wei-guo holds fast to the belief that as long as he continues to improve himself, his small business, and in turn, his country, his chance at love will come. He finally saves up the dowry required to enter matchmaking talks at the lowest rung as a third husband—the maximum allowed by law. Only a single family—one harboring an illegal spouse—shows interest, yet with May-ling and her two husbands, Wei-guo feels seen, heard, and connected to like never before. But everyone and everything—walls, streetlights, garbage cans—are listening, and men, excess or not, are dispensable to the State. Wei-guo must reach a new understanding of patriotism and test the limits of his love and his resolve in order to save himself and this family he has come to hold dear.

In Maggie Shen King’s startling and beautiful debut, An Excess Male looks to explore the intersection of marriage, family, gender, and state in an all-too-plausible future.

Dystopian Novel: set in China

Interesting look into a dystopian future of China. Reminds one of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”.
Thought provoking in many ways: government, populations, families, acceptance of people who are different.

Decent

Was a pretty good book had to listen to it for a class and write a paper that was about the only thing that brought the experience down for me. that and it's not what I typically get into.

Non stop read

I could not put this book down, this was a book that I started In the early part of the day, and at 3:30 in the morning I finished it. It was really engrossing and absorbing and all those words that mean you got sucked into a book and can put it away

Worth the listen

Not my typical style… but it was a great book. Kept my interest and made me think about how easily this could be reality.

Interesting Family Dynamic

I came across this book on Audible and was going through the reviews. I came across a review that rated this book poorly and stated that this was an awful book about “Chinese Sex.” That got me curious enough to want to read this book. What I’ve learned after reading/listening to this book was that the sex was the same as any race or culture. What I didn’t expect was a great storyline and well developed characters. If you want to read something different from the norm, this is the book.