About this item
Winner of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize "A vivid, magisterial novel that reaches back to China's civil war and up to the present day" -- The Guardian"In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old."Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations -- those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story. Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming's father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China's political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences.With maturity and sophistication, humor and beauty, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of life inside China yet transcendent in its universality.
About the Author
Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. She is the author of the story collection (2001) , and three novels, (2011) , shortlisted for Berlin's International Literature Prize and winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair's 2015 Liberaturpreis; and (2016) , about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s, and about the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. Her books and stories are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and have been translated into 25 languages. won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2016 Governor-General's Literary Award for Fiction, and an Edward Stanford Prize; and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize 2017. The novel was named a Critics' Top Book of 2016 and longlisted for a Carnegie Medal.
