About this item

Shortlisted forThe Rubery Book AwardINDIEFAB Book of the Year Award FinalistPenBellwether Prize FinalistA woman can have a career and family, but which comes firstA starving panda eats a hen in order to nurse her cub in the dead of winter--there begins the perilous adventure of Gu Bao, a girl who grows up under the Chinese governments one-child policy. Bao falls in love with a handsome soldier during the tumultuous Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The demonstrations transfix her fellow students and kill one of her friends. Bao finds herself pregnant and faces the end of her academic career. Her grieving parents arrange for a secret abortion and ship her off to her grandparents house in the remote countryside where she was raised.Bao searches for her inner strength while exploring the evocative Sichuan mountain landscape.