Catherine Raynes: Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China and Circle of Days

Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China by Jung Chang   Jung Chang’s Wild Swans was a book that defined a generation – the story of ‘three daughters of China’: Jung, her mother and her grandmother and their lives during a century of revolution. Fly, Wild Swans is, quite simply, what happened next.  Jung Chang arrived in the UK in 1978 aged 26, part of a Chinese scholarship programme for study abroad. Finding herself in the London of punk, political protests and Ziggy Stardust, she felt as if she’d landed on the moon. She and her fellow students had all grown up in complete isolation from the west, living in fear as to what might happen if they broke any of the strict rules imposed upon them by their government. It was an invaluable opportunity but came at a cost of long-term separation from her mother and family in China. As Jung began to adjust to life in the West, she warmed to the fashion scene, rebelled and thrived. Her studies took off and she became the first person from the People’s Republic of China to be awarded a doctorate from a British university. Fly, Wild Swans is, in many ways, Jung’s love letter to her mother set against China’s development from the relative freedoms of the late-1970s and untrammelled capitalism of the 1990s to the current authoritarian repressive rule of Xi-Jinping. With vivid flashbacks to her family’s experience in communist China, the book offers an extraordinary account of Jung’s research into the genocidal regime of Mao Tse-Tung, the many fictions she uncovered and the political consequences of publishing her subsequent biography.   As Jung becomes a successful academic and writer in the West, Fly, Wild Swans demonstrates how much she relies on her mother still living in China and the painful years in which politics has prevented them meeting.  Through the arc of their respective lives, she gives an immersive, deeply moving and unforgettable account of what it is like to live in a communist dictatorship and the threats modern China poses to the international world order. It is family history at its best.    Circle of Days by Ken Follett   A FLINT MINER WITH A GIFT  Seft, a talented flint miner, walks the Great Plain in the high summer heat, to witness the rituals that signal the start of a new year. He is there to trade his stone at the Midsummer Rite, and to find Neen, the girl he loves. Her family lives in prosperity and offers Seft an escape from his brutish father and brothers, within their herder community.  A PRIESTESS WHO BELIEVES THE IMPOSSIBLE  Joia, Neen's sister, is a priestess with a vision and an unmatched ability to lead. As a child, she watches the Midsummer ceremony, enthralled, and dreams of a miraculous new monument, raised from the biggest stones in the world. But trouble is brewing among the hills and woodlands of the Great Plain.  A MONUMENT THAT WILL DEFINE A CIVILISATION  Joia's vision of a great stone circle, assembled by the divided tribes of the Plain, will inspire Seft and become their life's work. But as drought ravages the earth, mistrust grows between the herders, farmers and woodlanders - and an act of savage violence leads to open warfare . . .  Truly ambitious in scope, Circle of Days invites you to join master storyteller Ken Follett in exploring one of the greatest mysteries of our age: Stonehenge.    LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.