Madeleine Thien's new novel is breathtaking in scope and ambition even as it is hauntingly intimate. With the ease and skill of a master storyteller, Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations--those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution in the mid-twentieth century; and the children of the survivors, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, in one of the most important political moments of the past century. With exquisite writing sharpened by a surprising vein of wit and sly humour, Thien has crafted unforgettable characters who are by turns flinty and headstrong, dreamy and tender, foolish and wise. At the centre of this epic tale, as capacious and mysterious as life itself, are enigmatic Sparrow, a genius composer who wishes desperately to create music yet can find truth only in silence; his mother and aunt, Big Mother Knife and Swirl, survivors with captivating singing voices and an unbreakable bond; Sparrow's ethereal cousin Zhuli, daughter of Swirl and storyteller Wen the Dreamer, who as a child witnesses the denunciation of her parents and as a young woman becomes the target of denunciations herself; and headstrong, talented Kai, best friend of Sparrow and Zhuli, and a determinedly successful musician who is a virtuoso at masking his true self until the day he can hide no longer. Here, too, is Kai's daughter, the ever-questioning mathematician Marie, who pieces together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking a fragile meaning in the layers of their collective story. With maturity and sophistication, humour and beauty, a huge heart and impressive understanding, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once beautifully intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of daily life inside China, yet transcendent in its universality.
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Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. She is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001), and three novels, Certainty (2006); Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), shortlisted for Berlin’s International Literature Prize and winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Liberaturpreis; and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016). Her books and stories are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and have been translated into 25 languages. Her short fiction appears inThe New Anthology of Canadian Literature, The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, The Broadview Introduction to Literature, Literature: A Pocket Anthology and elsewhere. Her work has been awarded the City of Vancouver Book Award, Amazon First Novel Award, a Canadian Authors Association Award, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and The Ovid Festival Prize, and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, and The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. Her literary criticism, essays, and multimedia work, on topics as diverse as music and human rights, personhood, female beauty, state surveillance, visual art, race, literary politics, neighbourhoods, and the Québec rodeo are widely available, including in The Guardian, Granta, Financial Times, PEN America, Five Dials, Brick, Warscapes, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, National Post, Globe & Mail, Literary Review of Canada and the Asia Literary Review. She has taught literature and fiction in Canada, China, Germany, Nigeria, the United States, Zimbabwe, Singapore, and Japan. With novelists Tsitsi Dangaremba and Ignatius Mabasa, she co-edited A Family Portrait, new fiction from Zimbabwe. Since 2010, she has been part of the international faculty in the MFA program at City University of Hong Kong. Along with novelist and photographer Rawi Hage, she was the inaugural Shadbolt Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University, which supported the publication and presentation of their new artistic work, Arrival. Her new book, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s, and about the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, is forthcoming in 2016. To contact the author, please send a note to dogsattheperimeter at gmail dot com or a private message on Twitter, @madeleinethien
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