Fly, Wild Swans
My Mother, Myself and China
Published on 16. September 2025
Book
Hardback
336 pages
978-0-00-866106-9 (ISBN)
Description
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO WILD SWANS, THE MULTI-MILLION COPY INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING SENSATION
'A must-read ... magnificent' DAILY TELEGRAPH *****
'Beautiful and moving' ELIF SHAFAK, OBSERVER
Jung Chang's Wild Swans was a book that defined a generation, an epic personal history of Jung, her mother and grandmother - 'three daughters of China'. The book opens in 1909 with her grandmother's birth - and foot-binding - when China was under the last emperor, moving through Mao Zedong's rule, especially the Cultural Revolution during which Jung's parents were subjected to horrendous ordeals because of their courage. It finishes in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping officially ended the Mao era and started the 'reforms'. Jung, at that propitious juncture, became one of the first Chinese to leave Communist China for the West.
Nearly half a century on, China has risen from a decrepit and isolated state to a global power, the challenger to the United States' dominant position in the world. Through those decades, Jung's life has been intimately entwined with her native land. Her experiences dealing with the regime in those years were rich and revealing - especially so because all her books were (and are) banned.
Fly, Wild Swans is the follow-up to Wild Swans and brings the story of Jung's family - along with that of China - up to date. The book is in many ways Jung's love letter to her mother. It is inevitably also about her grandmother and father, both of whom died tragically in the Cultural Revolution but are often recalled in this book. In fact, the past is never far away in Jung's subsequent life. It has shaped her, and moulded the present China, and what's more, it promises to herald the future.
China is now at another watershed moment with the era of Chairman Xi Jinping greatly affecting the lives of Jung and her mother. Fly, Wild Swans is Jung's heartfelt response to that experience, and a book filled with drama, love, curiosity and incredible history - both personal and global. Ultimately uplifting, told in Jung's clear, honest and compelling voice, it is memoir writing at its best.
'Profoundly revealing as a portrait both of a family and of the deeper traumas that lie at the heart of modern China' RORY STEWART
'Another wonder book from Jung Chang...I am quite blown away by it' LADY ANTONIA FRASER
THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL TO WILD SWANS, THE MULTI-MILLION COPY INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING SENSATION
'A must-read ... magnificent' DAILY TELEGRAPH *****
'Beautiful and moving' ELIF SHAFAK, OBSERVER
Jung Chang's Wild Swans was a book that defined a generation, an epic personal history of Jung, her mother and grandmother - 'three daughters of China'. The book opens in 1909 with her grandmother's birth - and foot-binding - when China was under the last emperor, moving through Mao Zedong's rule, especially the Cultural Revolution during which Jung's parents were subjected to horrendous ordeals because of their courage. It finishes in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping officially ended the Mao era and started the 'reforms'. Jung, at that propitious juncture, became one of the first Chinese to leave Communist China for the West.
Nearly half a century on, China has risen from a decrepit and isolated state to a global power, the challenger to the United States' dominant position in the world. Through those decades, Jung's life has been intimately entwined with her native land. Her experiences dealing with the regime in those years were rich and revealing - especially so because all her books were (and are) banned.
Fly, Wild Swans is the follow-up to Wild Swans and brings the story of Jung's family - along with that of China - up to date. The book is in many ways Jung's love letter to her mother. It is inevitably also about her grandmother and father, both of whom died tragically in the Cultural Revolution but are often recalled in this book. In fact, the past is never far away in Jung's subsequent life. It has shaped her, and moulded the present China, and what's more, it promises to herald the future.
China is now at another watershed moment with the era of Chairman Xi Jinping greatly affecting the lives of Jung and her mother. Fly, Wild Swans is Jung's heartfelt response to that experience, and a book filled with drama, love, curiosity and incredible history - both personal and global. Ultimately uplifting, told in Jung's clear, honest and compelling voice, it is memoir writing at its best.
'Profoundly revealing as a portrait both of a family and of the deeper traumas that lie at the heart of modern China' RORY STEWART
'Another wonder book from Jung Chang...I am quite blown away by it' LADY ANTONIA FRASER
Reviews / Votes
'BEAUTIFUL AND MOVING... Braiding her own story with that of her mother's, Chang skilfully sheds light on the transformation that the nation as a whole has gone through. [She] never shies away from addressing the problems of the regime while at the same time expressing her love for the culture and the people. She displays an extraordinary courage, even at the expense of personal risk or risk to her family. Almost half a century on, writing with unflinching determination once again, Chang has published a sequel to Wild Swans, but one that reads perfectly well on its own'ELIF SHAFAK, OBSERVER
'No 1990s bookshelf looked complete without Jung Chang's Wild Swans. This magnificent sequel picks up the thread. It's the story of how Chang makes a life as a writer in the West, and how China then responds to her success. SUPERB'
HELEN BROWN, DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Few can match Chang's ability to bring Chinese history and politics to life through deeply felt personal narrative, and few have shaped western understanding of China as broadly. Nearly 35 years on from the book that made her name, this story of suffering and success has the air of a closing chapter, a reckoning with both her achievements and the cost of the path she chose'
THE GUARDIAN
'Chang's use of personal and intimate experience to make unfathomable political events accessible works as triumphantly today as it did 34 years ago when Wild Swans burst on to the scene'
BOOK OF THE WEEK, SUNDAY TIMES
'Readers cherish Chang's books for offering glimpses of a vast and opaque nation. Fly, Wild Swans again demonstrates Chang's ability to explore subject matter of significant weight in prose that is a pleasure to read'
THE I PAPER
'Packed with poignant snapshots of family history and juicy episodes of literary life under state scrutiny ... the follow-up to her 1991 bestseller is both a tribute to her uncrushable mother and a powerful portrait of censorship and shifting attitudes in Xi's China'
FINANCIAL TIMES
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
HarperCollins Publishers
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 158 mm
Thickness: 34 mm
Weight
582 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-00-866106-9 (9780008661069)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
09/2025
William Collins
€19.89
Available for download
Book
09/2025
William Collins
€21.50
Available immediately
Person
Jung Chang is the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991), which has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. She wrote a ground-breaking trilogy of the history and personalities of modern China: Mao: The Unknown Story (2005, with Jon Halliday); Empress Dowager Cixi (2013); and Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister (2019)). Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
Jung Chang was born in Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) she worked as a peasant, a "barefoot" doctor, a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a PhD in Linguistics in 1982 at the University of York - the first person from Communist China to receive a doctorate from a British university. She has been awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for services to literature and to history.
Jung Chang was born in Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) she worked as a peasant, a "barefoot" doctor, a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a PhD in Linguistics in 1982 at the University of York - the first person from Communist China to receive a doctorate from a British university. She has been awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for services to literature and to history.