Nearly fifty years ago, Jung Chang's Wild Swans told the story of three generations of women in her family, and became a global phenomenon that sold in the tens of millions and introduced the world to the human reality behind decades of Chinese history — from the last emperor, through Mao's rule and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, to the reforms that followed.
Now, in the hotly anticipated Fly, Wild Swans, already an instant Sunday Times bestseller and named a Book of the Year by the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times and Waterstones, Jung brings that story up to date, tracing her family's — and China's — journey through the decades since, as China has transformed from an isolated, war-scarred state into a global superpower shaping the twenty-first century. At its heart, this is a love letter to Jung's mother, and a meditation on how the past continues to shape the present, as the era of Xi Jinping reshapes the lives of Jung and her family once again. Writing in the Observer, Elif Shafak described the book as beautiful and moving, while Rory Stewart has called it "profoundly revealing as a portrait both of a family and of the deeper traumas that lie at the heart of modern China" — this is a rare opportunity to hear one of the most important chroniclers of modern China reflect on memory, family, and a nation in flux.
Jung Chang is the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, one of the bestselling non-fiction books of all time, alongside acclaimed biographies of Mao Zedong, Empress Dowager Cixi, and the Soong sisters. Her books have been translated into more than forty languages and have sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide, though all remain banned in mainland China. She was born in Sichuan, China, and left for Britain in 1978, where she has lived ever since.
A Q&A session will follow.
