Tania in China, Paperback

If people think that the meteoric rise of China during the last 40 years is amazing, think again. Early in the twentieth century, a handful of young people totally changed the most populous nation on Earth in as little as 30 years, and that sweeping transformation still dominates China's destiny today. Would anyone believe it?

The product of a rare combination of commanding knowledge and piercing observations, Tania in China is an epic saga which unfolds that momentous story from inside out with matching audacity, insight and lucidity. It centres on Tania, the dedicated Russian heroine, whose adventures in love, marriage, family life and female friendship have been intertwined with a torrent of ferocious events in her adopted country for half a century. Following her odyssey into China's tumultuous society, intricate politics, enchanting culture and rich folklore, readers will witness how a radical ideology is turning China completely upside down in the most intimate and incisive fashion that few existing books have been able to show, fictional or otherwise.

"Unless one can think clearly, he/she cannot write clearly," a very famous historian once said to Ben Foster. Consider its dazzling past and daunting present, there is never a lack of material to write about China. Yet Foster could not find a satisfying book about the most crucial period from the 1920s to the 1970s, when the country has undergone a most spectacular transformation in recent memory.

To unravel a multitude of forces and players during that extraordinary period, he recalled, "I found myself dealing with too many actions, connections, interactions, causations and correlations to proceed. Several years ago I watched the movie The Theory of Everything. It then dawned on me that I might learn from Stephen Hawking to discover a common thread behind the infinite complexities of the universe. So I started thinking, and thinking long and hard until I hit the idea of Tania in China."