The Promise

Reviews

A brilliant storyteller. This book cracks the code of love, loneliness, and belonging in contemporary China. Reporting on four generations of one Chinese family and their diverging paths, Xinran shows how the country’s social norms have changed through politics and the rise of modernity. Xinran Xue is a gifted storyteller and The Promise reads like an unputdownable novel. William Spence’s translation from Chinese into English cannot be over-praised. ‘An absorbing, often startling, always persuasive exploration of contemporary China.’ [A] graceful work that restores a lost generation to history. One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved. Groundbreaking… This intimate record reads like an act of defiance, and the unvarnished prose allows each story to stand as testimony. ‘Right here we see the red lines that many Chinese still draw for themselves in public discourse, or even privately, the boundaries they dare not cross even today. No other style of storytelling could have exhibited them with more clarity or greater rawness.’ Exploring love and loss in modern China is a big job but it is in simplifying the overwhelming that Xinran excels. And in the introduction to this compelling and moving book, the author clarifies just how she has managed the task...In these carefully told vignettes, Xinran takes the reader through a century of tumult and change in China, her writing beautifully reflecting the intimate and honest voices of the women whose stories of love she tells. 'Xinran writes with a fine balance of economy, compassion and wisdom, and manages to be at once proud, critical, forward-looking, nostalgic, sad, angry and hopeful.’ Expand reviews