Wild Swans

Three generations of Chinese women across the 20th century — Jung Chang's grandmother, a warlord's concubine; her mother, a Communist Party idealist; and Chang herself, a Red Guard who eventually fled to the West. The novel spans the fall of the Qing dynasty, the Japanese occupation, the Communist revolution, and the Cultural Revolution. Chang writes from inside each woman's specific historical moment with extraordinary intimacy. The most widely read account of modern Chinese history ever published in English and the most human — not ideology but the people ideology happened to.