Peking - Hardcover

Grey, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297792040 ISBN 13: 9780297792048

Publisher: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988

Synopsis

This epic novel of a missionary and a young woman caught up in China’s Communist revolution is “an excellent read, panoramic in scope” (Financial Times).
 To a China racked by famine and bloody civil war in 1931, young English-born missionary Jakob Kellner brings all the crusading passion of his untried Christian faith. He burns to save the world’s largest nation from Communism. But on the cold, unforgiving Long March, amid horror and despair too great for Christianity to salve, Jakob becomes entangled with Mei-ling, a beautiful and fervent revolutionary. Powerful new emotions challenge and reshape his faith—and entrap him for life in the vast country’s tortured destiny.
Once held hostage by Red Guards in Peking for more than two years, author Anthony Grey crafts a portrait of China as a land of great beauty and harshness, of triumph and tragedy, as he traces the path of China’s Communist party from its covert inception through purge and revolution in an epic novel that enhances the reader’s understanding of modern China. 

About this title

About the Author:

Anthony Grey became a foreign correspondent with Reuters after beginning his career in journalism in Norfolk, England, where he was born and educated. He reported on the Cold War from East Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Sofia, and Bucharest for two years before being assigned to China to cover the Cultural Revolution. There, his imprisonment by Red Guards in a house beside the historic Forbidden City of China’s emperors attracted worldwide headlines for over two years. After his release, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to journalism, and was named UK Journalist of the Year. He has gone on to become a radio and television broadcaster, bestselling historical novelist, independent publisher, and frequent public speaker.

From Publishers Weekly:

Although titled Peking, this historical epic about China from the 1930s to the 1970s might more aptly have been called "The Long March": it recounts the legendary Long March of the Chinese Communists in flight from their foes in the '30s, and the "continuation" of the march during the more turbulent moments of Mao Tse-tung's rule. In 1934, Jakob Kellner, a British missionary, his American wife and their child are captured by Chinese Communists who set upon their rural mission. Kellner's wife is ruthlessly executed, his infant sent into hiding with a servant, and Kellner himself, his faith severely tested, forced to march for weeks in ragged clothes through awful weather with his captives. On the march, he is briefly united with Lu Mei-ling, a Chinese woman he met on his voyage to Shanghai. Mei-ling secretly takes care of his daughter and has a brief affair with him on the harsh journey. In the years following the Communist triumph, Kellner returns to China at times of crisis as a China watcher. Eventually, he introduces his grown daughter to the land and to the Chinese woman he loved and left behind. Grey (Saigon) has done a thorough job of conveying the cruelty of wholesale torture, privation and slaughter that accompanied the struggle between the Communists and the Kuomintang during the '30s. His depiction of the troubles during the "Hundred Flowers" purge of the '50s and the Cultural Revolution of the '60s, while instructive, stretches the novel farther than it will comfortably go.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Weidenfeld and Nicolson
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0297792040
• ISBN 13: 9780297792048
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 672