Do Not Say We Have Nothing
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016
WINNER OF THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE 2016
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PARAGRAPHE HUGH MACLENNAN PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016.
In Canada in 1991, ten-year-old Marie and her mother invite a guest into their home: a young woman who has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests. Her name is Ai-Ming.
As her relationship with Marie deepens, Ai-Ming tells the story of her family in revolutionary China, from the crowded teahouses in the first days of Chairman Mao's ascent to the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s and the events leading to the Beijing demonstrations of 1989. It is a history of revolutionary idealism, music, and silence, in which three musicians, the shy and brilliant composer Sparrow, the violin prodigy Zhuli, and the enigmatic pianist Kai struggle during China's relentless Cultural Revolution to remain loyal to one another and to the music they have devoted their lives to. Forced to re-imagine their artistic and private selves, their fates reverberate through the years, with deep and lasting consequences for Ai-Ming - and for Marie.
Written with exquisite intimacy, wit and moral complexity, Do Not Say We Have Nothing magnificently brings to life one of the most significant political regimes of the 20th century and its traumatic legacy, which still resonates for a new generation. It is a gripping evocation of the persuasive power of revolution and its effects on personal and national identity, and an unforgettable meditation on China today.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With stirring prose, Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien examines the link between historical and personal trauma. Marie Jiang is a thirtysomething math whiz in contemporary Vancouver. Her estranged dad, who committed suicide in Hong Kong, has always been an absent presence. His death coincided with the arrival of Ai Ming, the daughter of a family friend, who escaped to Canada after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Together, the two women use family journals to reconstruct the stories that connect them—and to understand the grief that infuses their fathers’ lives. Thien’s moving, thought-provoking novel is on the shortlist for 2016’s Man Booker Prize.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Thien's luminescent third novel (following Dogs at the Perimeter, which won the Frankfurt Book Fair's 2015 LiBeraturpreis), stories, music, and mathematics weave together to tell one family's tale within the unfolding of recent Chinese history. Beginning in 1989 in Hong Kong and Vancouver, this narrative snakes both forward and backward, describing how a pair of sisters survived land reform, re-education at the hands of the Communists, the coming of the Red Guard, the Cultural Revolution, and the protests at Tiananmen square. The story is partially told by the central character, mathematics professor Marie Jiang (Jiang Li-ling), as she discovers her late father's past as a pianist, which was left behind and concealed when he left China for Canada. Thien takes readers into the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where Marie's father studied with composer Sparrow and violinist Zhuli in the midst of the cultural upheaval in the 1960s. Filled with intrigue, shifting loyalties, broken families, and unbroken resistance, this novel is beautifully poetic and as carefully constructed as the Bach sonatas that make frequent appearance in the text. Thien's reach though epic does not extend beyond her capacity, resulting in a lovely fugue of a book that meditates on fascism, resistance, and personhood.
