Kai has 50 battered notebooks containing drafts of his self-criticisms. Each character chooses a different road out of the madness but the madness follows. Music is their life but the world around them belongs to Mao Zedong Thought. Thien’s novel revolves around three children of the Cultural Revolution: Kai the gifted pianist, Zhuli a violin child prodigy and Sparrow the composer. Mao Zedong, his Red Guard and all things old.

Big Mother Knife, her sister Swirl and Swirl’s lover Wen the Dreamer. Triangles create tension though not necessarily of the romantic kind. There are lots of triangles in Thien’s novel. But for a child of the Cultural Revolution, the geometry of loss remains ever present. There have been many lost generations since modern China came into being. The male figure is a phantom, a window into a violent past. Marie and Aiming are each in search of the fathers they never really knew, a loss chillingly reflected in the cover of my Granta edition. With maturity and sophistication, humor and beauty, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of life inside China yet transcendent in its universality.Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien is a novel about music and mathematics, silence and loss. Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming’s father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China’s political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming.

Master storyteller Madeleine 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 and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. “In a single year, my father left us twice.

Madeleine thien do not say