Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien
Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien
2 Rating(s)
List: $30.99 | Sale: $21.70
Club: $15.49

Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Author: Madeleine Thien

Narrator: Angela Lin

Unabridged: 20 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 10/11/2016


Synopsis

Winner of the Giller Prize and Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. "A vivid, magisterial novel that reaches back to China's civil war and up to the present day" -The Guardian "In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old." Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations-those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story. Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming's father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China's political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences. With maturity and sophistication, humor and beauty, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of life inside China yet transcendent in its universality.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Hannah on March 19, 2024

I have a new BookTube channel! Come find me at Hello, Bookworm📚🐛 Click here to watch a video review of this book on my (old) channel, From Beginning to Bookend. A young Chinese girl (Li-Ling), whose English name is Marie, is living with her mother in Vancouver when a relative from China appears at the......more

Goodreads review by jessica on May 17, 2021

confession: this took me forever to read because i kept nodding off every time i picked it up. didnt matter what time it was, the pages would cause my eyes to slowly close and my mind to drift away. and it wasnt because i was bored, but because the writing is sooo lulling and slow and gentle, as if......more

Goodreads review by Sofia on August 16, 2021

Spanning multiple generations, Do Not Say We Have Nothing is the tale of a large extended family and how music brought them together in times of hardship. Their story unfolds in front of the curious eyes of a girl named Marie, the child of Kai, a pianist who lived during the Cultural Revolution, one......more

Goodreads review by Lena on May 30, 2023

Great family saga whose lives were shattered by merciless communist party. Four stars if you ignore the first hundred pages. Cos the beginning of the novel quiet dull: until you get to know all the characters and historical background it's very unemotional. Even the narrator's depression described s......more

Goodreads review by John on June 04, 2024

History matters. "Do Not Say We Have Nothing" is Madeleine Thien's ambitious third novel spanning three generations of a Chinese family. The family's history is deeply intertwined with both the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square Massacre. During the Cultural Revolution, we follow a group of......more