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Anhua Gao was born in 1949 in Shandong, Nanjing Province and moved to England after a lifetime of tremendous hardship in December 1994. This is her first book. She now lives in Folkestone, Kent.
A story in the tradition set by Jung Chang with Wild Swans, this is a moving epic which recounts the story of one woman's struggle against an inflexible, often inhumane regime. Anhua Gao grew up in the shadow of Red China, having been born after her father and mother met as recruits in the newly-formed Fourth Army. When a senior officer had threatened to coerce Anhua's mother into marriage, her father, who had left home at 13 to seek his fortune, cut off his little finger to demonstrate the extent of his love. The couple were married in 1942, but soon Red regiments were hunted down and Gao's sister was hidden for three days in a cave while her guardian, the Widow Liu, was hideously murdered by troops hunting rebels. But when the tide turns and her grandfather, an enemy of the Party, arrives to ask for mercy, he is turned away by his son. Packed with human detail and poignancy, littered with stories of appalling brutality, the courage of the narrator who escaped to tell her tale is luminous. (Kirkus UK)
