Notes

521 pages.

Summary: As a child in Beijing in the 1970s, Lai lives with her family in a lively, working-class neighbourhood near the heart of the city. Thoughtful yet unassuming, she spends her days with her friends beyond the attention of her parents. But Lai is quickly awakened to the harsh realities of the Chinese state. As she enters adolescence, Lai meets a mysterious and wise bookseller who introduces her to great works--Hemingway, Camus, and Orwell, among others--that open her heart to the emotional power of literature and her mind to thrillingly different perspectives. Along the way, she experiences the ebbs and flows of friendship, the agony of grief, and the first steps and missteps in love. A gifted student, Lai wins a scholarship to study at the prestigious Peking University where she soon falls in with a theatrical band of individualists and misfits dedicated to becoming their authentic selves, despite the Communist Party's insistence on conformity--and a new world opens before her. As 1989 unfolds, the spirit of change is in the air.