The middle kingdom
Description
For Grace, the ardent yet puzzled heroine of Andrea Barrett&;s third novel, this trip has been planned as a three-week stay: she&;s to play dutiful wife to Walter, her prominent scientist husband, at the 1986 Beijing International Conference on the Effects of Acid Rain. Walter is twelve years older than Grace, and as sour as the rain he studies; he and Grace are at a particularly troubled point in their marriage. Their tightly circumscribed visit, however, becomes a journey infinitely less tidy and more complex as Grace falls forever out of love with her husband and very much in love with this country and its culture. In the chaos of the Beijing streets and in the home of her new friends Dr. Yu and her son Zaofan, Grace finds the web of life she&;s been too lost to perceive. &;Time you spend in the past and future is time you spend alone,&; Dr. Yu tells her. &;But between them there is a middle kingdom, both feet planted here.&;
More Details
ISBN
9780007102877
9780007102884
9780671729615
9780007102884
9780671729615
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Published Reviews
Publisher's Weekly Review
An overweight, complacent American woman on a 1986 visit to Beijing becomes fascinated with China and energetically embraces a new life in this affecting tale. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
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Publishers Weekly Reviews
An overweight, complacent American woman on a 1986 visit to Beijing becomes fascinated with China and energetically embraces a new life in this affecting tale. (Mar.) Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information.
Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information.
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Publishers Weekly Reviews
The Beijing of 1986 serves as the backdrop for this affecting novel about an American woman's self-discovery. At 30, Grace has succumbed to a type of emotional paralysis. Buried in fat, unwilling to face the past and incapable of imagining her own future, she chalks up a string of failures: abandoned schools and careers, one divorce and a precarious marriage to Walter, a scientist. Accompanying Walter to a conference in Beijing, Grace is jolted out of her complacency as she is befriended by a Chinese woman, a doctor. A severe bout of pneumonia lands her in the hospital, attended by her new friend, and in her feverish state she relives the sorry episodes that have temporarily defeated her. Her illness, paradoxically, cures her, and she finds the courage to embrace an entirely new life. Barrett ( Lucid Stars ) here recreates not China itself but, more reasonably, her heroine's fascination with it, and she manages to infuse her characters, Grace especially, with a psychic energy and charm that belie their saddened states. Literary Guild alternate. (Mar.) Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information.
Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information.
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