Janet Song
“I finally understand what the poets have written. In spring, moved to passion; in autumn only regret.”
In seventeenth-century China, in an elaborate villa on the shores of Hangzhou’s West Lake, Peony lives a sheltered...
Sixty-eight-year-old Hattie Kong, descendant of Confucius, daughter of an American missionary, has lived to see both her husband and her best friend die back-to-back in a single year: "It was like having twins...She got to book the same church with the same pianist for both funerals and did think she should have gotten some sort of twofer from the crematorium."
But two years later, it's time for Hattie to start over. She moves to a small New
...The most ambitious work of fiction by a writer widely considered the most important novelist working in China today
In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flowerbeds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee—whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can only
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