![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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