Half a Lifelong Romance, Eileen Chang
Half a Lifelong Romance, Eileen Chang
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Half a Lifelong Romance
A Novel

Author: Eileen Chang, Karen S. Kingsbury

Narrator: Emily Woo Zeller

Unabridged: 15 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/01/2016

Synopsis

From one of twentieth-century China’s greatest writers and the author of Lust, Caution comes an unforgettable story of a love affair set in 1930s Shanghai.Manzhen is a young worker in a Shanghai factory where she meets Shijun, the son of wealthy merchants. Despite family complications, they fall in love and begin to dream of a shared life together—until circumstances force them apart. When they are reunited after many years, can they start their relationship again? Or is it destined to be the romance of only half a lifetime?This affectionate and captivating novel tells the moving story of an enduring love affair and offers a fascinating window onto Chinese life in the first half of the twentieth century.

About Eileen Chang

Eileen Chang (1920–1995), who lived in the United States after fleeing Communist China in 1956, was a prominent fiction writer, essayist, and public intellectual. She is the author of The Rice-Sprout Song: A Novel of Modern China and The Rouge of the North, among other works.

About Karen S. Kingsbury

Karen S. Kingsbury taught and studied in Chinese-speaking cities for nearly two decades and currently lives in Pennsylvania. She has translated Love in a Fallen City and other essays and stories by Eileen Chang.

About Emily Woo Zeller

Emily Woo Zeller began her voice-over career by voicing animation in Asia. She returned to the United States in 2009 and found a natural fit as an audiobook narrator. Described by AudioFile magazine as doing "an extraordinary job of varying the voices in the dialogue without losing the intimacy of the story," Emily's multilingual, multicultural framework brings a particularly unique, clear-eyed, and intimate perspective into Asian American narratives. While she specializes in Asian American narratives, Emily's work spans a broad spectrum, including young adult fiction and such titles as The Whites of Their Eyes by Jill Lepore and The Sex Diaries Project by Arianne Cohen. She also narrated Gulp by Mary Roach, for which she won an AudioFile Earphones Award.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Inderjit on April 14, 2018

Tragedy and ennui are typical outcomes in most of Eileen Chang’s love stories; the characters are often overcome by a sense of fatalism, of life getting in the way of their relationships, of unrequited and unfulfilled love. These are the dominant themes in ‘Half a Life-Long Romance’, which follows t......more

Goodreads review by Katie on April 23, 2022

A fantastic book – powerful, compelling, thought-provoking and beautiful.......more

Goodreads review by Diana on March 08, 2024

Half a Lifelong Romance [1950/66/2014] – ★★★★★ “Maybe a love like that came to a person only once in a lifetime? Once was enough, maybe” [Chang/Kingsbury, 1950/2014: 354]. “Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness” (Bertrand Russell). Half a Lifelong Romance......more

Quotes

“An enveloping, haunting, and insightful read, rich in Chang’s trademark passionate prose.” Wall Street Journal

“The most mature and fully achieved novel by the midcentury writer Eileen Chang…A small masterpiece of understatement and indirection. It has a grave tenderness, alert to the manners and gestures of bourgeois family life, almost reminiscent of Henry James or Edith Wharton. It’s an excellent introduction to the complex work of an underappreciated writer.” New York Times Book Review

“Plenty to savor. Chang’s attention to detail is meticulous, and the way the plot navigates societal mores and taboos calls to mind the work of Edith Wharton…Over the course of the novel, romance and regret are interlaced, each one given the appropriate weight. With compelling protagonists and a host of memorable supporting characters, this novel tells an emotionally complex story with a number of powerful moments.” Kirkus Reviews

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