Fall for the Book Presents: Their Divine Fires: Love and Secrets in the Shadow of Chinese Revolutions
Their Divine Fires: Love and Secrets in the Shadow of Chinese Revolutions
Virtual via Zoom
Spanning three generations of Chinese and Chinese-American women, Wendy Chen’s debut novel, Their Divine Fires, is both passionate and spell-binding. When a marriage is violently destroyed in 1917 at the dawn of the Chinese Revolution, a woman’s grief and secrets are passed down to her daughters, and in turn, to her granddaughter, haunting each woman through the Cultural Revolution and beyond. The characters’ love affairs and secrets are interwoven with folktale and myth, in a novel author Ruth Madievsky calls, “utterly hypnotic—the kind of novel only a poet could write. Never before have I read a debut that captures so perfectly the ache of what is left unsaid between generations.” Sponsored by Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.