Inheritance

by Lan Samantha Chang

Overview

Spanning seven decades and set in China and America against a backdrop of political chaos and social upheaval, this arresting debut novel tells a timeless story of familial devotion undermined by deceit and passion and rebuilt by memory.

In 1931, abandoned after their mother's suicide, the young Junan and her sister, Yinan, make a pact never to leave each other. The two girls are inseparable—until Junan enters into an arranged marriage and finds herself falling in love with her soldier husband. When the Japanese invade China, Junan and her husband are separated. Unable to follow him to the wartime capital, Junan makes the fateful decision to send her sister after him. Inheritance traces the echo of betrayal through generations and explores the elusive nature of trust.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393327113
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/17/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	314
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of three novels: The Family Chao, Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her work has been translated into nine languages. The director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in Iowa City.

Editorial Reviews

"The book's strength is its characters, who are driven by love, crafty relatives, and a hunger to know the past."

Boston Globe

"A polished story, smooth as stone. It is most poignant as it delves into the follies that make us human."

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"A guilty pleasure that makes for an indulgent afternoon, its an intelligent and well-formulated work of literature."

San Francisco Chronicle - Anhoni Patel

A guilty pleasure that makes for an indulgent afternoon, its an intelligent and well-formulated work of literature.--Anhoni Patel "San Francisco Chronicle"

A polished story, smooth as stone. It is most poignant as it delves into the follies that make us human.-- "Milwaukee Journal Sentinel"

The book's strength is its characters, who are driven by love, crafty relatives, and a hunger to know the past.-- "Boston Globe"

From the Publisher

In her first book, Hunger: A Novella and Stories, Chang focused on the intricate, sometimes hallucinatory tensions in Chinese-American families straddling the old country and the new. But in Inheritance she shifts her perspective, seeing American life almost as a postscript. The novel's action, viewed in retrospect from New York in the 1990's, takes place almost entirely in the China of midcentury, amid its tidal waves of political and social change. Shaped by their country's traditions, Yinan and Junan struggle with the shattering alterations to the world their mother knew: love, enmity and mutual need serve both to bind the two sisters and to force them apart.
— The New York Times

Richard Eder