Review Excerpt:

(Ma Jian's) masterful new novel, Beijing Coma, is informed by his return in 1989 to take part in Democracy Spring. The hero, a student named Dai Wei, is an eyewitness to the killing of his friends in the early morning hours of June 4, 1989, by the People's Liberation Army, which was ordered by the government to put down pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. After taking a friend, whose legs had been crushed by a tank, to a hospital mired in the blood of the dead and dying, Dai Wei goes back to the streets, where the conflict is still raging. Seeing his former Hong Kong girlfriend emerge like a vision of the Goddess of Democracy, he runs toward her, but a shot is fired, and she falls to her knees. As he wonders whether she has been hit, a bullet explodes in his head.

Full review at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/22/AR200805...