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Shop nowHalf a Lifelong Romance
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Learn moreFrom one of twentieth-century China’s greatest writers and the author of Lust, Caution comes an unforgettable story of a love affair set in 1930s Shanghai.
Manzhen is a young worker in a Shanghai factory where she meets Shijun, the son of wealthy merchants. Despite family complications, they fall in love and begin to dream of a shared life together—until circumstances force them apart. When they are reunited after many years, can they start their relationship again? Or is it destined to be the romance of only half a lifetime?
This affectionate and captivating novel tells the moving story of an enduring love affair and offers a fascinating window onto Chinese life in the first half of the twentieth century.
Eileen Chang (1920–1995), who lived in the United States after fleeing Communist China in 1956, was a prominent fiction writer, essayist, and public intellectual. She is the author of The Rice-Sprout Song: A Novel of Modern China and The Rouge of the North, among other works.
Emily Woo Zeller is an Audie and Earphones Award–winning narrator, voice-over artist, actor, dancer, and choreographer. AudioFile magazine named her one of the Best Voices of 2013. Her voice-over career includes work in animated film and television in Southeast Asia.
Karen S. Kingsbury taught and studied in Chinese-speaking cities for nearly two decades and currently lives in Pennsylvania. She has translated Love in a Fallen City and other essays and stories by Eileen Chang.
Reviews
“An enveloping, haunting, and insightful read, rich in Chang’s trademark passionate prose.”
“The most mature and fully achieved novel by the midcentury writer Eileen Chang…A small masterpiece of understatement and indirection. It has a grave tenderness, alert to the manners and gestures of bourgeois family life, almost reminiscent of Henry James or Edith Wharton. It’s an excellent introduction to the complex work of an underappreciated writer.”
“Plenty to savor. Chang’s attention to detail is meticulous, and the way the plot navigates societal mores and taboos calls to mind the work of Edith Wharton…Over the course of the novel, romance and regret are interlaced, each one given the appropriate weight. With compelling protagonists and a host of memorable supporting characters, this novel tells an emotionally complex story with a number of powerful moments.”
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