Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Description

One of the best-selling and best-loved books of recent years, 'Wild Swans' is an epic true story of how one family lived and survived through some of China's most unsettling and violent times. The publication of 'Wild Swans' in 1991 was a worldwide phenomenon. Not only did it become the best-selling non-fiction book in British publishing history, with sales of well over two million, it was received with unanimous critical acclaim, and was named the winner of the 1992 NCR Book Award and the 1993 British Book of the Year Award. Few books have ever had such an impact on their readers. Through the story of three generations of women - grandmother, mother and daughter - 'Wild Swans' tells nothing less than the whole tumultuous history of China's tragic twentieth century, from sword-bearing warlords to Chairman Mao, from the Manchu Empire to the Cultural Revolution. At times terrifying, at times astonishing, always deeply moving, 'Wild Swans' is a book in a million, a true story with all the passion and grandeur of a great novel.

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.

'It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this book.' Mary Wesley '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