Peking
An Epic Novel of Twentieth-Century China
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4.1 • 11 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This epic novel of a wide-eyed missionary and a rebellious woman thrust into China’s Communist revolution is “an excellent read, panoramic in scope” (Financial Times).
In 1931, young English-born missionary Jakob Kellner brings all the crusading passion of his untried Christian faith to a China racked by famine and bloody civil war. He burns to save the world’s largest nation from Communism.
But when he is swept along on the cold, unforgiving Long March, Jakob becomes entangled with Mei-ling, a beautiful and fervent revolutionary. Soon, powerful new emotions challenge and reshape his faith—and entrap him forever in the vast country’s tortured destiny.
Once held hostage by Red Guards in Peking for more than two years, author Anthony Grey traces the path of China’s Communist party from its covert inception through purge and revolution. He crafts a portrait of China as a land of great beauty and harshness—of triumph and tragedy—in a sweeping narrative, rich in historical and cultural revelations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although titled Peking, this historical epic about China from the 1930s to the 1970s might more aptly have been called ``The Long March'': it recounts the legendary Long March of the Chinese Communists in flight from their foes in the '30s, and the ``continuation'' of the march during the more turbulent moments of Mao Tse-tung's rule. In 1934, Jakob Kellner, a British missionary, his American wife and their child are captured by Chinese Communists who set upon their rural mission. Kellner's wife is ruthlessly executed, his infant sent into hiding with a servant, and Kellner himself, his faith severely tested, forced to march for weeks in ragged clothes through awful weather with his captives. On the march, he is briefly united with Lu Mei-ling, a Chinese woman he met on his voyage to Shanghai. Mei-ling secretly takes care of his daughter and has a brief affair with him on the harsh journey. In the years following the Communist triumph, Kellner returns to China at times of crisis as a China watcher. Eventually, he introduces his grown daughter to the land and to the Chinese woman he loved and left behind. Grey (Saigon) has done a thorough job of conveying the cruelty of wholesale torture, privation and slaughter that accompanied the struggle between the Communists and the Kuomintang during the '30s. His depiction of the troubles during the ``Hundred Flowers'' purge of the '50s and the Cultural Revolution of the '60s, while instructive, stretches the novel farther than it will comfortably go.
