Do not say we have nothing : a novel

“In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, & the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old.”Madeleine Thein’s gripping evocation of the persuasive power of revolution & its effects on personal & national identity: this new novel is breathtaking in scope & ambition even as it is hauntingly intimate. Canada 1991. Ten-year-old Marie & her mother invite a guest into their home: a young woman who has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests. Through the sharing of the woman’s family story, Madeleine Thein brings to life one of the most significant political regimes of the 20th century & its traumatic legacy, which still resonates for a new generation."...a beautiful, sorrowful work. The book impresses in many senses: It stamps the memory with an afterimage; it successfully explores larger ideas about politics & art; it has the satisfying, epic sweep of a 19th-century Russian novel, spanning three generations & lapping up against the shores of two continents ... The larger saga unfurls like silk — & proves similarly resistant to knots, a testament to Ms Thien’s storytelling skills... Ms Thien captures painfully well the depersonalization & numbness of living through the Cultural Revolution." - Jennifer Senior, The New York TimesShortlisted for the 2017 Women's Prize For FictionMadeleine Thien is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001), & three novels, Certainty (2006); Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), shortlisted for Berlin’s International Literature Prize & winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Liberaturpreis; & Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) which won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2016 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Folio Prize 2017, an Edward Stanford Prize & was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. ****Winner of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize** "A vivid, magisterial novel that reaches back to China's civil war and up to the present day" ―__The Guardian__** “In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old.” Master storyteller Madeleine 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 and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story. Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming’s father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China’s political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences. With maturity and sophistication, humor and beauty, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of life inside China yet transcendent in its universality. « "In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old." Master storyteller Madeleine 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 and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story. Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming's father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli, were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China's political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences. »-- Jaquette