Inheritance
Spanning seven decades and set in China and America against a backdrop of political chaos and social upheaval, this arresting debut novel tells a timeless story of familial devotion undermined by deceit and passion and rebuilt by memory.
In 1931, abandoned after their mother's suicide, the young Junan and her sister, Yinan, make a pact never to leave each other. The two girls are inseparable—until Junan enters into an arranged marriage and finds herself falling in love with her soldier husband. When the Japanese invade China, Junan and her husband are separated. Unable to follow him to the wartime capital, Junan makes the fateful decision to send her sister after him. Inheritance traces the echo of betrayal through generations and explores the elusive nature of trust.
“… the sense of long family histories both spoken and unspoken is powerful, and the restrained conclusion has the force of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.”—Publishers Weekly
“Chang fulfills the promise of her haunting short-story collection, Hunger (1998), with an elegant first novel that seems impossibly wise about the strictures of love and culture.”—Booklist
“In ‘Inheritance,’ Chang has done much more than create a dragon lady and counterpose her to a quietly heroic sister… Tragedy in the classic sense is rare nowadays; ‘Inheritance,’ with China’s rich and rigid culture taking on the role of the gods, makes the older sister a tragic figure, unpurged.”—Richard Eder, New York Times
“The story…is foreign in its historical sweep and social detail but universal in its emotional truth.”—Boston Globe