I love Liu Zhenyun's writing style - pared back, dry and very funny. He uses repetition to great comic effect. His main character is a complex anti-heroine, Li Xuelian, a young village woman with a husband and son. When she becomes pregnant for the second time, she hatches a plan: she and her husband will get a fake divorce, she will have the baby, and then they will reunite as a family of four. There's just one problem: while they are separated to await the birth of their second child, he meets another woman. By the time she has her daughter, he has remarried and his new wife is pregnant. Li is furious, and her desire for revenge, to take her husband, at the very least, to court, sparks a snowballing series of events that see her pitched in litigious battle with bureaucrats from the village level to the National People's Congress... It's fast-paced, cleverly plotted and delightful to read. I did wonder how the author had got away with what is at times a truly cutting satire of the political system - and then realised that throughout the book, no one from the Party ever appears as such, in other words, while China is in fact run as a Party-state, with the Communist Party having the final say (so, for example, a municipal party-secretary will trump a mayor when it comes to important decisions or policy), the book only deals with the representatives of the state. The Party remains safely out of sight. But Chinese readers are unlikely to miss this point; they are used to filling in the blanks.
(I have seen that there is a translation, under the clumsy title, I Did Not Kill My Husband, but can't recommend it as I haven't read it.)