In the Lap of the Gods

A Novel by Li Miao Lovett

The waves lapped against the shore, muffling the baby’s cries. As the water advanced, it threatened to swallow the wicker basket resting on a spur of limestone. The river, now a growing lake, crept up the fields inch by inch. Now the ripening ears of wheat disappeared, their spikelets resisting the current before being pulled under.

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A dam rises on the Yangtze, uprooting a million lives, and a poor salvager who has lost everything finds an abandoned baby girl. A tale of defiance, of a lost man finding his place—and a new kind of love—in modern China, and a rich man reclaiming his soul and the woman he loved before the Revolution tore them apart.

"An important, even invaluable book, a moving farewell to the old, more humane way of life as China and all the world become technologized and globalized." --Maxine Hong Kingston

"The effects of modernization and the battle between man and nature are the heavy themes Lovett tackles in this powerful first novel set in modern-day China.... A moving, compelling read about people fighting against both government and nature, which prove equally insurmountable and capricious." --Booklist, starred review

Asian Review of Books

"Coincidentally with the publication of this very cinematic first novel by LI MIAO LOVETT, the Three Gorges Dam in China's Hubei Province reached full capacity with the water level at 575 feet above sea level. This astonishing engineering achievement has been accompanied also by a massive relocation of those people whose homes, villages and cities are now underwater. The human and political consequences of this uprooting in the name of progress are at the heart of this novel. The Chinese character chai, meaning "raze" adorns the front cover and the chapter headings: it is the character spray-painted on houses and buildings slated for demolition throughout China and in some quarters has become a symbol of protest against what some call "modernization" and others see as "eradication". Another contemporary novel which has this symbol at its heart is Ma Jian's Beijing Coma.

IN THE LAP OF THE GODS opens with a very powerful scene in which Liu Renfu braves the encroaching waters of the Yangtze... READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW

Publishers Weekly

"Lovett's evocative novel portrays widower Liu Renfu, a day laborer turned scrounger, caught in the Yangtze dam breach, part of the Chinese government's relocation plan. Liu braves the terrifying waters, alone, after losing his family, searching for items to sell. "The river showed no mercy. It swallowed the landscape in slow, heaving gulps. The surrounding fields had all but disappeared, digested over the course of the day in a pulpy mass." In his search, Liu discovers an abandoned infant and saves the child from drowning. The baby, who he names Rose, becomes his charge, despite Liu's meager circumstances. In his scavenging, Liu also uncovers an item that is precious to Fang Shuping, a successful local businessman whose yearning for the past forces him to confront contemporary injustice, altering his life in the process. Lovett's complex tale of displacement and hardship, contrasting modern China with its past, highlights the human spirit's capacity for renewal."

The Barnes & Noble Review

"The Three Gorges Dam in China, which blocked the flow of the Yangtse River, is the most powerful hydroelectric project ever attempted. The largest feat of engineering in China since The Great Wall, the dam will displace millions of people in some of the most fertile, most beautiful, and most ecologically sensitive land on earth. It's against this maelstrom of extremes that Li Miao Lovett sets In the Lap of the Gods, her ambitious and often moving first novel.
Liu Renfu is a grieving widower engaged in the illegal work of scavenging valuables from homes deserted as the dammed Yangtze river floods the land. On one such foray, he finds an abandoned baby, her basket ready to swirl into the rising current. Liu collects the girl, "A little kitten…left for the river god." Then, as dusk falls and the Yangtze rises, he quickly strips the baby's former home of valuables. 
Though Liu plans to sell the abandoned infant, when it's time to hand her over to a middleman in a nearby city, he can't quite give her up. He names her Rose, concocts a cover story for them both, and sets about trying to earn a living.
As Liu searches for love and, yes, meaning in his life, Lovett offers up a compelling, sometimes damning portrait of the Three Rivers project. The author has done her research, and though the prose is occasionally awkward, the details of Chinese life shine through. In the Lap of the Gods is an affecting story of massive change, told in small moments."

International Examiner (the Newspaper of the Northwest Asian American Communities)

“In the Lap of The Gods” is an elegy to the landscape and geography of a region with great rivers. It provides a lyrical ending to those villages Liu scavenges, villages buried in the swollen water of the rivers, by nature and by human planning.... The novel comes with high praises."