Fly, Wild Swans

‘BEAUTIFUL AND MOVING… Braiding her own story with that of her mother’s, Chang skilfully sheds light on the transformation that the nation as a whole has gone through. [She] never shies away from addressing the problems of the regime while at the same time expressing her love for the culture and the people. She displays an extraordinary courage, even at the expense of personal risk or risk to her family. Almost half a century on, writing with unflinching determination once again, Chang has published a sequel to Wild Swans, but one that reads perfectly well on its own’

ELIF SHAFAK, OBSERVER

‘No 1990s bookshelf looked complete without Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. This magnificent sequel picks up the thread. It’s the story of how Chang makes a life as a writer in the West, and how China then responds to her success. SUPERB’

HELEN BROWN, DAILY TELEGRAPH

‘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

‘Chang’s use of personal and intimate experience to make unfathomable political events accessible works as triumphantly today as it did 34 years ago when Wild Swans burst on to the scene’

BOOK OF THE WEEK, SUNDAY TIMES

‘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

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.