Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“If you haven’t time to read the book, make time for listening to the book – six hours long, but worth every minute.” High Fliers Autumn 97

‘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

A new edition of one of the best-selling and best-loved books of recent years.

The publication of Wild Swans in 1991 was a worldwide phenomenon. Not only did it become the best-selling non-fiction book in British publishing history, with sales of well over two million, it was received with unanimous critical acclaim, and was named the winner of the 1992 NCR Book Award and the 1993 British Book of the Year Award.

Few books have ever had such an impact on their readers. Through the story of three generations of women – grandmother, mother and daughter – Wild Swans tells nothing less than the whole tumultuous history of China’s tragic twentieth century, from sword-bearing warlords to Chairman Mao, from the Manchu Empire to the Cultural Revolution. At times terrifying, at times astonishing, always deeply moving, Wild Swans is a book in a million, a true story with all the passion and grandeur of a great novel.