Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien Narrated by Angela Lin

Overview

Winner of the Giller Prize and Longlisted for the 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.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times - Jennifer Senior

…a beautiful, sorrowful work. The book impresses in many senses: It stamps the memory with an afterimage; it successfully explores larger ideas about politics and art (the mind is never still while reading it); it has the satisfying, epic sweep of a 19th-century Russian novel, spanning three generations and lapping up against the shores of two continents…The background of Do Not Say We Have Nothing pulses with music. Ms. Thien has that rare, instinctive sense of what it's like for a person's brain to be a hostage to its inner score—the call inside these characters' heads is always louder than the call of the outside world, most fatally that of the Communist Party—and her observations about Bach and Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Debussy are some of the book's sweetest pleasures, as are her ruthless critiques of musicians.

The New Yorker

"Powerful."

The Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"[A] graceful, intricate novel whose humanity threads through it like a stirring melodic line."

The New York Times - Jiayang Fan

"A powerfully expansive novel…Thien writes with the mastery of a conductor who is as in command of the symphony’s tempo as she is attuned to the nuances of each individual instrument."

Financial Times

"Extraordinary…It recalls the panoramic scale and domestic minutiae of the great 19th-century Russian writers…[A] highly suspenseful drama…as courageous and principled as resistance itself."

Sunday Times

"Music is at the center of this ambitious saga of totalitarian China, where classical musicians were persecuted during the Maoist Cultural Revolution…Thien’s intricate narrative slowly lays bare the lives of three musical friends living through a totalitarian era when serious music had to survive driven underground, like forbidden love."

Herald

"A deeply profound and moving tale where music, mathematics and family history are beautifully woven together in a poetic story…Full of wisdom and complexity, comedy and beauty, Thien has delivered a novel that is both hugely political and severe, but at the same time delicate and intimate, rooted in the tumultuous history of China."

The Times

"A magnificent epic of Chinese history, richly detailed and beautifully written."

Guardian

"This is a moving and extraordinary evocation of the 20th-century tragedy of China, and deserves to cement Thien’s reputation as an important and compelling writer."

Yiyun Li

"Imagination, Nabokov says, is a form of memory. Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a perfect example of how a writer’s imagination keeps alive the memory of a country’s and its people’s past when the country itself tries to erase the history. With insight and compassion, Madeleine Thien presents a compelling tale of China of twentieth century."

Alice Munro

"A splendid writer."

Sam Sacks - The Wall Street Journal

"[A] graceful, intricate novel whose humanity threads through it like a stirring melodic line."

The New Yorker

Powerful.

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2016-10-05
Shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, Thien’s ambitious saga explores the upheavals in Chinese politics from 1949 to the present through several generations of friends, family, and lovers whose intersecting destinies are upturned by the sweep of events.In 1989, at the time of the Tiananmen Square uprising, Jiang Kai, a renowned concert pianist in China before he defected in the '70s, abandons his wife and 10-year-old daughter, Marie, in Vancouver to fly to Hong Kong, where he commits suicide. Soon afterward, Ai-ming, the 19-year-old daughter of Kai’s former teacher at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, who was killed by authorities during the uprising, flees China and arrives in Vancouver. The girls soon bond reading the Book of Records, a never-seeming-to-end series of notebooks left among Kai’s possessions and written in the handwriting of Ai-ming's father, Sparrow. The novel follows Marie as she unravels the mystery of her father’s death, his life as a musician in China, and his relationship with Sparrow. She is guided by the notebooks, which narrate a parallel, fairy-tale version of events. But the heart of the story lies with Kai and Sparrow and their attempts to define themselves inside the rapidly shifting political climate that turns against artists and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Fear and pragmatism drive ambitious 17-year-old pianist Kai, who watched his family starve to death as a child in the 1959 famine; joining the Red Guard allows him to pursue his music within limits. Kai’s teacher/friend/lover Sparrow, a composer of genius whose family is torn apart by party loyalties, wills himself into creative invisibility, choosing survival over art. Sparrow’s cousin, the violinist Zhuli, whom both men love, refuses to join or hide, and her idealism destroys her. Through these and a host of other sharply rendered characters, Thien (Certainty, 2007) dissects China’s social and political history while raising universal questions about creativity, loyalty, and identity. Mythic yet realistic, panoramic yet intimate, intellectual yet romantic—Thien has written a concerto dauntingly complex and deeply haunting.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170225545
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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