Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (Collins Modern Classics)

Description

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come. Few books have had such an impact as Wild Swans: a popular bestseller which has sold more than 13 million copies and a critically acclaimed history of China; a tragic tale of nightmarish cruelty and an uplifting story of bravery and survival. Through the story of three generations of women in her own family - the grandmother given to the warlord as a concubine, the Communist mother and the daughter herself - Jung Chang reveals the epic history of China's twentieth century. Breathtaking in its scope, unforgettable in its descriptions, this is a masterpiece which is extraordinary in every way.

Jung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was a red guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a 'barefoot doctor', a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and was subsequently awarded a scholarship by York University, where she obtained a PhD in linguistics in 1982 - the first person from the People's Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university. She is the author of the best-selling Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, and, along with her husband Jon Halliday, of the biography, Mao: The Unknown Story. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 15 million copies, in addition to millions in pirated editions and computer downloads in mainland China where both books are banned. Among the many awards she has won are the UK Writers' Guild Best Non-Fiction (1992) and Book of the Year UK (1993). Her latest book Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, was published in 2013.

'Riveting; an extraordinary epic' Mail on Sunday 'Everything about Wild Swans is extraordinary. It arouses all the emotions, such as pity and terror, that great tragedy is supposed to evoke, and also a complex mixture of admiration, despair and delight at seeing a luminous intelligence directed at the heart of darkness' Minette Marrin, Sunday Telegraph 'Immensely moving and unsettling; an unforgettable portrait of the brain-death of a nation' J.G. Ballard, Sunday Times 'Wild Swans made me feel like a five-year-old. This is a family memoir that has the breadth of the most enduring social history' Martin Amis, Independent on Sunday 'There has never been a book like this' Edward Behr, Los Angeles Times