“Shawna Yang Ryan’s propulsive storytelling contains us via a bloody time in Taiwanese background, its implications nonetheless reverberating this present day. the tale is haunted by way of questions on even if Taiwan is part of China or its personal nation, what the prices are of status up for one’s ideals and through the alternatives made by way of one father and his daughter. Green Island is a difficult, unsentimental and relocating novel that may be a memorial not just to the heroes, but in addition to the survivors.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of The Sympathizer

A gorgeous tale of affection, betrayal, and relations, set opposed to the backdrop of a altering Taiwan over the process the 20th century.

February 28, 1947: Trapped contained in the kinfolk domestic amid an rebellion that has rocked Taipei, Dr. Tsai gives you his youngest daughter, the unnamed narrator of Green Island, just after middle of the night because the urban is plunged into martial legislation. within the following weeks, because the chinese language Nationalists act to overwhelm the competition, Dr. Tsai turns into one of many many millions of individuals dragged clear of their households and thrown into legal. His go back, after greater than a decade, is marked through alienation from his household and paranoia between his community—conflicts that loom over the starting to be bond he types along with his youngest daughter. Years later, this stricken prior follows her to the us, the place, as a mom and a spouse, she too is pressured to make your mind up among what's correct and what could store her family—the comparable selection she witnessed her father make a long time before.  

As the radical sweeps throughout six a long time and continents, the lifetime of the narrator shadows the process Taiwan’s heritage from the tip of jap colonial rule to the many years below martial legislation and, ultimately, to Taiwan’s transformation right into a democracy. yet, above all, Green Island is a lush and lyrical tale of a kin and a kingdom grappling with the nuances of complicity and survival, elevating the query: how a long way may you be prepared to move for those you love?

From the Hardcover edition.