Inspired by the author’s own family history, and spanning the past hundred years of Chinese history, this multi-generational family saga explores how women survive the tsunamis of history. 

1948, Zhoushan, China. Twelve-year-old Ah Xue watches her mother earn a living combing the hair of the wealthy women in their small fishing village, as reports of civil war and the rising Communist revolution grow closer to home.

Years later, Mimosa grows up in the shadow of her parents’ struggles, while the looming tension of the Cultural Revolution threatens to pull her family apart.

And Fei, raised as a boy by the activist father she can’t help but idolise, grapples with her identity in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

From an astonishing new writer, it explores with remarkable tenderness the enduring repercussions of trauma, the search for stability in disorder, and the often contradictory nature of familial love.