Fly, Wild Swans

‘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, it brings her story and that of China up to date whilst giving an unforgettable account of what it is like to live in a communist dictatorship – one that forbids a daughter to visit her mother’s deathbed. It is a book about love, family and the terrible price paid by them all in the face of China’s cruel politics’

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. Passages of great beauty speak to her love of Chinese culture alongside unsparing descriptions of life under a cruel system. Her book takes the reader into the private worlds, the trade-offs and the dangers of proximity to power in modern China, showing us how much, and yet so little, has changed since the days when Jung Chang’s family suffered during the rule of Chairman Mao. In the author’s telling, fear has simply been modernised. It is a persuasive and compelling read’

Michael Sheridan

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.