Inheritance: A Novel

by Lan Samantha Chang

Overview

A timeless story of familial devotion undermined by deceit and passion and rebuilt by memory.

In 1931, abandoned after their mother's suicide, the young Junan and her sister, Yinan, make a pact never to leave each other. The two girls are inseparable—until Junan enters into an arranged marriage and finds herself falling in love with her soldier husband. When the Japanese invade China, Junan and her husband are separated. Unable to follow him to the wartime capital, Junan makes the fateful decision to send her sister after him. Inheritance traces the echo of betrayal through generations and explores the elusive nature of trust. Reading group guide included.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393344769
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/30/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	147,856
File size:	864 KB

About the Author

Lan Samantha Chang's fiction has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Story and The Best American Short Stories 1994 and 1996. Chang is the author of the award-winning books Hunger and Inheritance, and the novel All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. She is the recipient of the Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote fellowships at Stanford University. She also received, from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Teaching-Writing fellowship and a Michener-Copernicus fellowship. Her many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she directs the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Editorial Reviews

A story of sisterly love, romantic love and betrayal, this novel starts in China in 1931 and takes the reader to California and New York. It is about romantic love and political chaos and how sisters, brothers and married couples can often be divided as their loyalties change, because of love and politics. In this tale, two sisters in China in the 1930s, born of a mother who commits suicide, find themselves competing over the older sister's husband. The husband and his brother split over political differences, just as China and Taiwan split. The narrator is a young Chinese American woman who attempts to unravel her own family's history in the 1990s and, in doing so, takes the reader to her grandparents' and parents' China. The author grew up in Wisconsin, the daughter of Chinese immigrants who remembered a China that no longer existed. This novel is her attempt to discover the China of her parents and to reconcile the many divisions she creates in her fictional world. The modern American reader will find the names, the geography and the culture of the Chinese part of the novel somewhat confusing, but it is those details that give the story its texture. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2004, Norton, 302p., Ages 15 to adult.
—Nola Theiss

KLIATT