Items related to The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai
Li Jing, a high-flying financier, has just joined his father for dinner at the grand Swan Hotel in central Shanghai when, without warning, the ground begins to rumble. It shifts like a pre-historic animal, then explodes in a roar of hot, unfurling air. As Li Jing drags his unconscious father out of the collapsing building, a single shard of glass whistles through the air and neatly pierces his forehead. In an instant, Li Jing's ability to speak Chinese is obliterated. After weeks in hospital, all that emerge from his mouth are unsteady phrases of the English he spoke as a child growing up in Virginia. His wife, Zhou Meiling, whom he courted with beautiful words, finds herself on the other side of an abyss, unable to communicate with her husband and struggling to put on a brave face - for the sake of Li Jing's floundering company, and for their son, Pang Pang. A neurologist who specialises in Li Jing's condition - bilingual aphasia - arrives from the US to work with Li Jing, to coax language back onto his tongue. Rosalyn Neal is red-haired, open-hearted, recently divorced, and as lost as Li Jing in this bewitching, bewildering city. As doctor and patient sit together, sharing their loneliness along with their faltering words, feelings neither of them anticipated begin to take hold. Feelings Meiling does not need a translator to understand. A sensitive exploration of the power of words and of silence, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai is a wonderfully evocative debut about love and language, duty and passion, in a vibrant modern city.
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Review:
`An engrossing novel that will enchant you from beginning to end' * David Ebershoff, author of The 19th Wife * `Intelligent and thoughtful ... skilfully examines the complex relationship between language and identity, seeing beyond the words themselves to the way in which they mould our thoughts and shape our personalities ... A novel which makes us think beyond our boundaries' * Clare Morrall, author of Astonishing Splashes of Colour * `What a gem of a debut. This is the most literary kind, rarely found in fictions about new China. There is such deep silence in her prose, hinting at the depth of human suffering, anguish and hope. A gifted novelist, she gives us the insight into a Shanghai that is at once strange and familiar, old and new, creating a literary landscape for its dwellers that is vast and beguiling, which is precisely the spirit of this metropolis, and of this fine fiction' * Da Chen, author of Brothers * 'From the explosion of its first pages to the searing emotion of its last, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai is a novel that burns with the heat of clashing cultures and love transformed. Ruiyan Xu is a wonderful writer with a perfect ear for both the words and the silences that define us' * Peter Manseau, author of Songs for the Butcher's Daughter *
Book Description:
A moving and atmospheric debut about love and language set in modern-day Shanghai
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- PublisherBloomsbury Paperbacks
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 1408820161
- ISBN 13 9781408820162
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages352
- Rating
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The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai
Published by
Bloomsbury Paperbacks
(2011)
ISBN 10: 1408820161
ISBN 13: 9781408820162
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Book Description paperback. Condition: Used; Good. Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. This book is in good condition but will show signs of previous ownership. Please expect some creasing to the spine and/or minor damage to the cover. Aged book. Tanned pages and age spots, however, this will not interfere with reading. Seller Inventory # CHL9558684
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