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"When things get bad, we'll just have to eat dead people."

This is the third novel of Yu's that I have read and I can say he is consistently great, though some might find the innate undercurrent of bleakness and violence a little disturbing. I certainly don't. I also disagree with the usual inane American cover blurbs about how these novels are all about "totalitarian" ways of life and going out of their way to excoriate China pretty much any way they can.
Sure, that's there. It can't help but be since Yu grew up during the worst excesses of the zany Cultural Revolution, but his novels, especially this one, are novels about families, their dynamics, and how external events can affect each member. I'm not so sure I'd go so far as to say Yu is using the family as a microcosm of Chinese political culture, because I think his concern is something greater and unsettling for the "Western" reader: the disintegration of the family in the modern world, the violence inherent in that collapse, and the profundity of rural idiocy.
Cries constitutes the random memories of Sun Guanglin, who gets given to another family at age 6 and returns home as a teenager, unwanted and spurned by his father. Events are out of order, chaotic, and tentatively linked, but the vignettes are stark and grim with Sun present as both witness and victim. Dark but beautifully composed, with a fine, bleak sense of humor as well.