In Vancouver in 1990, a year after her father’s inexplicable suicide, Marie and her mother are visited by Ai-ming, a young woman fleeing China following the protests in Tiananmen Square. Through Ai-ming, Marie painstakingly reconstructs a shared history: the friendship of their fathers, prodigiously talented musicians at the Shanghai Conservatory, and the fortunes of their families during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution.
Thien’s writing has a symphonic quality: motifs – memory, inheritance, love, loyalty – repeat and intertwine, crescendoing to the events of 1989. Language and music become a means of transcending ideology: the novel’s title – a line from The Internationale sung defiantly by the students of Tiananmen – also gestures eloquently to the inexpressible loss of the generations “forged and reformed” by the revolutionary years. Restrained, courageous and profound, Thien’s novel – now Booker longlisted – bears witness to a period the true history of which remains contested.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing is published by Granta (£12.99). Click here to order a copy for £10.65
