Do Not Say We Have Nothing [Signed 1st Printing]

Thien, Madeleine

ISBN 10: 0345810422 / ISBN 13: 9780345810427

Published by Knopf Canada, Toronto, 2016

About this Item

1st printing of the first Canadian hardcover edition SIGNED by the author on the title page with a black fountain pen. Full red cloth with gold titles and white end papers. Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and a finalist for the Booker Prize. The novel is a companion to the author's 2025 novel because "The Book of Records" figures prominently in this book. A tight copy with sharp corners. The heel of the book's spine has softened. Thin pages are a distinct feature of the first printing upgraded in the next printing. The jacket is bright and crisp with sharp edges and price intact. See our inventory of multiple signed first printings of other books by the author, including a signed and dated first printing of The Book of Records (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2025).

Seller Inventory # 002636

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Do Not Say We Have Nothing [Signed 1st Printing]
• Publisher: Knopf Canada, Toronto
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0345810422
• ISBN 13: 9780345810427
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Canadian Fiction, Autographed
  • Governor General's Award Winner - Autographed
  • Madeleine Thien, Autographed

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and longlisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, this extraordinary novel tells the story of three musicians in China before, during and after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

   Madeleine Thien's new novel is breathtaking in scope and ambition even as it is hauntingly intimate. With the ease and skill of a master storyteller, Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations--those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution in the mid-twentieth century; and the children of the survivors, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, in one of the most important political moments of the past century. With exquisite writing sharpened by a surprising vein of wit and sly humour, Thien has crafted unforgettable characters who are by turns flinty and headstrong, dreamy and tender, foolish and wise.
     At the centre of this epic tale, as capacious and mysterious as life itself, are enigmatic Sparrow, a genius composer who wishes desperately to create music yet can find truth only in silence; his mother and aunt, Big Mother Knife and Swirl, survivors with captivating singing voices and an unbreakable bond; Sparrow's ethereal cousin Zhuli, daughter of Swirl and storyteller Wen the Dreamer, who as a child witnesses the denunciation of her parents and as a young woman becomes the target of denunciations herself; and headstrong, talented Kai, best friend of Sparrow and Zhuli, and a determinedly successful musician who is a virtuoso at masking his true self until the day he can hide no longer. Here, too, is Kai's daughter, the ever-questioning mathematician Marie, who pieces together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking a fragile meaning in the layers of their collective story.
     With maturity and sophistication, humour and beauty, a huge heart and impressive understanding, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once beautifully intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of daily life inside China, yet transcendent in its universality.