NCW Libraries

During the darkest days of the Cultural Revolution, a twelve-year-old boy named Love Liu wonders what life is like beyond the region of Xinjiang in China's remote northwest. Here, conformity is valued above all else, and suspicion governs every exchange among neighbors, classmates, and even friends. Into this stifling atmosphere comes a tall, clean-shaven teacher from Shanghai, with an elegant gray wool jacket and an English dictionary tucked under...

Starting in 1972 when she is nine, Ling, the daughter of two doctors, struggles to make sense of the communists' Cultural Revolution, which empties stores of food, homes of appliances deemed "bourgeois," and people of laughter.

It is the late 1960s and there is no peace in the village of Yellow Stone for little Da and his family, who were former landowners; they are all persecuted by the Red Guard, particularly Da's oldest sister, Sisi, who tries hard to conform to the new political realities, but who cannot overcome the frightened hostility of the other villagers--so Sisi escapes to find work in a school in another town, taking Da with her, and trying to find a compromise...

"With the scope of Dune and the commercial action of Independence Day, this near-future trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multple-award-winning phenemonenon from China's most beloved science fiction author. Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the...

"In the summer of 1986 in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. What Junie doesn't know is that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly estranged from one another in their adopted country. In order for Momo to fulfill his promise, he must make one last desperate attempt to reunite all three...

"With the scope of Dune and the rousing action of Independence Day, this near-future trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multple-award-winning phenemonenon from China's most beloved science fiction author. In Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion--in just four centuries' time. The aliens' human collaborators may have been defeated, but the presence of the sophons, the subatomic...

Michael Wood has traveled the length and breadth of China, the world's oldest civilization and longest lasting state, to tell a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity, and deep humanity that stretches back thousands of years. After a century and a half of foreign invasion, civil war, and revolution, China has once again returned to center stage as a global superpower and the world's second largest economy. But how did it become so dominant?...