China: The Novel

by Edward Rutherfurd

Overview

The “unparalleled master of the historical saga" (Newsweek) and internationally bestselling author of Paris and New York takes on an exhilarating new world with his trademark epic style in China: The Novel

In China: The Novel, Edward Rutherfurd brings his renowned talents to the Middle Kingdom, when the clash of East and West in the nineteenth century shattered the stability of the two-thousand-year-old empire. This epic tale chronicles the great struggle for power, from the Opium Wars that erupted in 1839 through the Taiping revolt, the British burning of the Summer Palace, the Boxer Rebellion, and the long rule of the Dragon Empress, culminating in the momentous revolution of 1911. We meet a young village wife struggling with rigid traditions, Manchu warriors, powerful eunuchs and concubines of the Forbidden City, rapacious English soldiers and earnest missionaries, savvy Chinese pirates, and sage philosophers. Rutherfurd brings to vivid life the ever-changing fortunes of Chinese, British, and American families as they negotiate the tides of history. A rich human drama as well as a deeply researched portrait that sets the stage for China’s role in the world today, China: The Novel is the enthralling story of a rising global power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804171038
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Pages:	784
Sales rank:	171,390
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

EDWARD RUTHERFURD is the internationally bestselling author of eight novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Paris, New York, London, The Princes of Ireland, and The Rebels of Ireland.

Editorial Reviews

Beginning with the First Opium War in 1839 and continuing through the present day, Rutherfurd tells a sweeping tale that brings to life a nation's history, traditions and the people who lived through it as if by magic.”
―Newsweek

“Bravo; this is a big, complex, and utterly involving portrait of 19th-century China.”
—The Times (London)

“It’s a bravura performance, fizzing with incident, excitement and energy.”
—The Daily Mail

“[An] action-packed saga.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“Edward Rutherfurd is known for massive historical novels usually set in cities like New York, Paris and London. They dig deeply into a specific place and he focuses on a certain period. . . . Rutherfurd’s thorough research shows again here in his descriptions of China and other places in Asia like Hong Kong and Macao. . . . Besides place, Rutherfurd also has thoroughly researched the many complexities of Chinese culture. . . . China can perhaps be placed in the same basket as the James Clavell novels of Tai-Pan and Noble House. . . . Worth sticking with all 760 pages” 
—Asian Review of Books

From the Publisher

2021-01-13
An overstuffed coffer of silver yuan, renegade generals, general yearning, jeweled nail guards, and pilfered testicles.

China: The Novelmay have all the marketing ring of Hot Dog...The Movie, but Rutherfurd’s formula over half a dozen period soaps remains constant: Take a historical period, populate it with dashing and dastardly characters, and go to town. Here it plays out in a tale full of Orientalizing clichés that would drive Edward Said to despair, from the obligatory “Confucius says” to yowling rebels dispatched by heroic Britons, with one such ingrate coming a cropper thanks to an expertly hurled cricket ball. “Shall I kill him, Grandfather?” asks the young lad who lobbed the googly. “I can chop his head.” Grandfather is a fellow named John Trader, who appears early in this century-spanning story as an ambitious lad who lives up to his last name shifting opium and tea. The stern Scottish general who inspects him in India, whose “eyebrows turned up at the ends so that he looked like a noble hawk”—think C. Aubrey Smith’s character in the 1939 film The Four Feathers, parts of which seem to have drifted into Rutherfurd’s imaginarium—eventually allows Trader into his demesne, but only after Trader loses an eye and thereafter projects a Lord Nelson–ish aspect. His remaining eye is firmly fixed on his beloved Agnes, who says pithy things like, “Have you had a good lunch?” Meanwhile, big doings are afoot: The European powers are carving out territories, contending warlords are mussing up the Confucian order, and, as the narrator of this part of the multipart saga tells us, “the clouds were darkening.” That narrator, the most interesting character in a book full of stick figures, is a eunuch who is not quite omniscient and certainly unreliable and who spends psychic energy engineering the disappearance of an enemy’s detached genitalia while faithfully serving an empress who’s not above voicing an authorial groaner: Asked about the practice of foot binding, she replies, “I’m going to take steps to end it.” Ouch.

A by-the-numbers romp in the exotic.

Kirkus Reviews