Thursday 19 November 2015

Published Today: Little Aunt Crane by Geling Yan

About the book: In the last days of World War Two, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria has collapsed. As the Chinese move in, the elders of the Japanese settler village of Sakito decide to preserve their honour by killing all the villagers in an act of mass suicide. Only 16-year-old Tatsuru escapes. But Tatsuru’s trials have just begun, and she falls into the hands of human traffickers. She is sold to a wealthy Chinese family, where she becomes Duohe – the clandestine second wife to their only son, and the secret bearer of his children. Against all odds, Duohe and the first wife Xiaohuan put aside their differences and form an unlikely friendship, united by the unshakeable bonds of motherhood and family. Spanning several tumultuous decades of Mao’s rule, Little Aunt Crane is a novel about love, overcoming adversity, and how humanity endures in the most unlikely of circumstances.


About the author: Geling Yan is one of the most acclaimed contemporary novelists and screenwriters writing in the Chinese language today and is also a well-established writer in English. Her much-praised novel The Flowers of War took The Rape of Nanjing as its harrowing subject, in 2012, the novel was made into a movie of the same name.


Details: Little Aunt Crane is published in paperback by Harvill Secker, priced in local currencies.