With maturity and sophistication, humour and beauty, a huge heart and impressive understanding, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once beautifully intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of daily life inside China, yet transcendent in its universality. Here, too, is Kai's daughter, the ever-questioning mathematician Marie, who pieces together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking a fragile meaning in the layers of their collective story. With the ease and skill of a master storyteller, 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 in the mid-twentieth century and the children of the survivors, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, in one of the most important political moments of the past century.Īt the centre of this epic tale are enigmatic Sparrow, a genius composer who wishes desperately to create music yet can find truth only in silence his mother and aunt, Big Mother Knife and Swirl, survivors with captivating singing voices and an unbreakable bond Sparrow's ethereal cousin Zhuli, daughter of Swirl and storyteller Wen the Dreamer, who as a child witnesses the denunciation of her parents and as a young woman becomes the target of denunciations herself and headstrong, talented Kai, best friend of Sparrow and Zhuli, and a determinedly successful musician who is a virtuoso at masking his true self until the day he can hide no longer. Her novels and stories have been translated into twenty-five languages, and her essays have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, the Financial Times, Five Dials, Brick and Al Jazeera.

Madeleine Thien's new novel is breathtaking in scope and ambition. Her most recent novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Madeleine Thien's internationally acclaimed, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning novel now available in a beautiful trade paperback.

Do not say we have nothing