The Communist's Daughter
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Dennis Bock’s novel The Communist’s Daughter met with praise from readers and reviewers the moment it reached bookstore shelves, debuting as an instant Maclean’s bestseller. This is the story of legendary Canadian doctor Norman Bethune—visionary, radical, martyr. Amidst the death and chaos of the Japanese army’s advance into the hills of northern China, Bethune composes a wrenching letter to his daughter, a small child he has never seen, the daughter of a woman abandoned in war-torn Spain.
Set against the tumult of the late 1930s, The Communist’s Daughter is a remarkable depiction of the moral ambiguities of war, political idealism and personal responsibility, an elegant, passionate novel that unfolds against the sweep of history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this artful blend of fact and fiction, Bock (The Ash Garden) spins a stirring what-if story from the legendary in Canada and China, at least life of battlefield surgeon Norman Bethune. The Canadian-born doctor's disdain for "the doomed experiment of capitalism" took him to Spain in 1936 to fight against the Fascists, and to China in 1938 to provide medical succor for Mao Tse-tung's ragtag army struggling against the Japanese. His life story, factually intact but fancifully imagined, is recounted through letters to a daughter Bethune never knew (and, historically, never had) written from China but never dispatched. Bock's vivid first-person narrative exquisitely captures the malice of war: Bethune's bloody WWI experiences, the horror of bombing raids during the Spanish Civil War and the numbing deprivation of Chinese peasants trapped between Mao's revolutionary army, the Japanese invaders and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. But the novel's most affecting moments stem from Bock's portrayal of the troubled soul of a war-weary idealist whose dreams of a better world were battered by ugly reality. The sound historical foundation will resonate with Canadian readers; U.S. readers will appreciate the story as powerful and affecting fiction.
