Spanning the Great Famine through to the Cultural Revolution and beyond, this exceptional and totally absorbing book is not only a testament to the youth of China who took fate in their own hands by marching on Tiananmen Square in April of 1989, but is also a complex--yet at the same time somehow disturbingly simple--memoir of a young girl growing up amid a poverty and squalor that we, in our cosy homes with food on the table and light and warmth, can barely envisage.

Writing without sentimentality, and with a calm austerity that belies the passion of her youth, Hong Ying takes her reader to the very heart of her early life, growing up as she did with the stench of the slums on the banks of the Yangtze River seeping into her very soul.

Her extraordinarily ordinary life, touched by deep passion and profound darkness, steeped in history and ancient superstition, deprived of truth and trust and teetering on the brink of obscurity, makes for a severe and harrowing read that evokes images so strong and so intense that the sights,smells and sounds of Hong Ying's world seep into the mind, body and soul of the reader until they are there with her, hoping that there is more, praying that there is a way forward. But what perhaps is most disturbing about Daughter of the River is the startling realisation that what we are reading is not simply the story of one woman. It is the story of a nation, and for every child who lived through those years and found a kind of peace there are others who stood little hope of escape and are perhaps still there, fighting for the air they breathe.

Truly remarkable in every way, this beautiful, ugly, audacious, shy little book is, quite simply, one that everyone should read. --Susan Harrison