Catherine Raynes: It Could Have Been Her and Nothing To My Name

It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell   It was the night she almost died.   Jane Trevally, newly divorced and feeling a little lost, agrees to accompany a man she doesn't know to his house in the darkest corner of Hampstead Heath. She's offered a drink, goes in, and then - a scream and the sound of something falling upstairs - and Jane senses she's in a bad place and in danger. She runs.   Twenty-five years later, Jane finds herself outside the same house, this time to return a small white dog who's been found near her home in the country; a dog whose owner has just been reported missing.   A fleeting glimpse of a haunted looking woman through the window sends Jane on a mission to uncover the house's secrets - secrets more terrifying than she could have ever imagined, especially when she realises it could have been her...   A missing woman, a dysfunctional family and dark, dark secrets...     Nothing To My Name by Kangkang Li Kovacs   Inspired by the author’s own family history, and spanning the past hundred years of Chinese history, this multi-generational family saga explores how women survive the tsunamis of history  Nothing to My Name chronicles the intertwined fates of three generations of Chinese women: Ah Xue, Mimosa, and Fei. The Grandmother, Ah Xue, witnesses the rise of the Communist Revolution while earning a meager living combing the hair of the few wealthy ladies in her small fishing village. Mimosa, the Mother, grows up in the shadow of her parents’ struggles as the growing tension of the Cultural Revolution threatens to pull their family apart. And Fei Fei, the Daughter, brought up as a “boy” by her activist father, grapples with gender identity in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre.  Awash in the tides of societal upheaval, Ah Xue, Mimosa, and Fei Fei are all driven by the instinct to survive, weathering hardship that splinters the boundary between the personal and the political. For readers of sweeping upmarket book club fiction like Pachinko and Homegoing, Nothing to My Name is a braided history of suffering and dignity, of loss and reckoning, and of the unexpected joy that sustains family bonds.    LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.