Fly, Wild Swans

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

Jung Chang is the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991), which has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. She wrote a ground-breaking trilogy of the history and personalities of modern China: Mao: The Unknown Story (2005, with Jon Halliday); Empress Dowager Cixi (2013); and Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister (2019). Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Jung Chang was born in Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) she worked as a peasant, a “barefoot” doctor, a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a PhD in Linguistics in 1982 at the University of York – the first person from Communist China to receive a doctorate from a British university. She has been awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for services to literature and to history.