Overview

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO WILD SWANS, THE MULTI-MILLION COPY INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING SENSATION A Book of the Year in The Times; Daily Telegraph; Financial Times and Waterstones 'A must-read … magnificent’ DAILY TELEGRAPH ***** 'Beautiful and moving' ELIF SHAFAK, OBSERVER Jung Chang’s Wild Swans was a book that defined a generation, an epic personal history of Jung, her mother and grandmother – ‘three daughters of China’. The book opens in 1909 with her grandmother’s birth – and foot-binding – when China was under the last emperor, moving through Mao Zedong’s rule, especially the Cultural Revolution during which Jung’s parents were subjected to horrendous ordeals because of their courage. It finishes in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping officially ended the Mao era and started the ‘reforms’. Jung, at that propitious juncture, became one of the first Chinese to leave Communist China for the West. Nearly half a century on, China has risen from a decrepit and isolated state to a global power, the challenger to the United States’ dominant position in the world. Through those decades, Jung’s life has been intimately entwined with her native land. Her experiences dealing with the regime in those years were rich and revealing – especially so because all her books were (and are) banned. Fly, Wild Swans is the follow-up to Wild Swans and brings the story of Jung’s family – along with that of China – up to date. The book is in many ways Jung’s love letter to her mother. It is inevitably also about her grandmother and father, both of whom died tragically in the Cultural Revolution but are often recalled in this book. In fact, the past is never far away in Jung’s subsequent life. It has shaped her, and moulded the present China, and what’s more, it promises to herald the future. China is now at another watershed moment with the era of Chairman Xi Jinping greatly affecting the lives of Jung and her mother. Fly, Wild Swans is Jung’s heartfelt response to that experience, and a book filled with drama, love, curiosity and incredible history – both personal and global. Ultimately uplifting, told in Jung’s clear, honest and compelling voice, it is memoir writing at its best. 'Profoundly revealing as a portrait both of a family and of the deeper traumas that lie at the heart of modern China' RORY STEWART 'Another wonder book from Jung Chang…I am quite blown away by it' LADY ANTONIA FRASER

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9780008661069

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Reviews

‘Few can match Chang’s ability to bring Chinese history and politics to life through deeply felt personal narrative, and few have shaped western understanding of China as broadly. Nearly 35 years on from the book that made her name, this story of suffering and success has the air of a closing chapter, a reckoning with both her achievements and the cost of the path she chose’ THE GUARDIAN 'Readers cherish Chang’s books for offering glimpses of a vast and opaque nation. Fly, Wild Swans again demonstrates Chang’s ability to explore subject matter of significant weight in prose that is a pleasure to read’ THE I PAPER ‘Packed with poignant snapshots of family history and juicy episodes of literary life under state scrutiny … the follow-up to her 1991 bestseller is both a tribute to her uncrushable mother and a powerful portrait of censorship and shifting attitudes in Xi’s China’ FINANCIAL TIMES ‘A testament to her dedication to her mother, and to family love that persists despite barriers. It will captivate fans of Chang’s earlier work' IRISH INDEPENDENT 'Painful. Astonishing. Honest. Profoundly revealing as a portrait both of a family and of the deeper traumas that lie at the heart of modern China' RORY STEWART ‘Fly, Wild Swans is another wonder book from Jung Chang. Elegiac and beautifully written, I am quite blown away by it’ LADY ANTONIA FRASER ‘Jung Chang’s powerful and profoundly moving sequel to Wild Swans has been well worth the wait. Her and her remarkable mother’s story since the end of Wild Swans intertwines fascinatingly with that of national socialist modern China, with their love-filled human story threatened by hideous Communist oppression, all over again. Threatened, but because of their bravery and evident decency, never crushed’ ANDREW ROBERTS ‘Far more than a sequel, Fly Wild Swans is the elegiac account by Jung Chang of the literary life that made her famous and the price she has paid for being a loyal daughter' MICHAEL SHERIDAN

PRAISE FOR WILD SWANS ‘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

Author Information

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.

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