● Debut novel of award-winning Chinese writer Ge Liang

● A love story that extends across three generations and a hundred years and transcends national boundaries

● A record of travels through the avenues and alleys of Nanjing

Xu Tingmai, a young man of Chinese heritage born in Scotland, returns to China to study in his father's hometown Nanjing. He is enamored by the ancient Confucius Temple, and by the banks of the Qinhuai River he meets a mysterious girl named Cheng Nan, proprietor of an antique store and underground casino. The work focuses on their feelings for one another and follows the footsteps of "foreign visitor" Xu Tingmai, probing the past and present of this ancient capital and telling a tale of Nanjing that extends across three generations.

In 1923, a girl named Ye Yuzhi accompanied her father to Nanjing to take up the family business, a traditional Chinese pharmacy. In 1936, Yuzhi fell in love with a Japanese man named Akutagawa, and on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War gave birth to a baby girl. Yuzhi was tragically killed in the Nanjing Massacre, and her daughter was passed from family to family and finally raised by a prostitute, Cheng Yunhe, who named the girl Cheng Yichu. In 1950, Yichu, now a university student, fell in love with a Malaysian man of Chinese heritage named Lu Yiwei. Amid brewing political turmoil, Yiwei was sent to work on a farm in the northeast, Yunhe commits suicide, and Yichu wedded a construction worker prone to violence. Twenty years later, having lost her husband, Cheng Yichu was living with her daughter Cheng Nan, when her old flame Lu Yiwei reappeared unexpectedly…

A golden rosefinch pendant has been passed from mother to daughter for three generations in a time period overlapping with the Sino-Japanese War and several other major events in Chinese history. Their tale is one of individual love and hate in tumultuous times, feminine patience and strength, the unflagging life-force of Chinese people, and kindness and dignity in the face of unpredictable fate. Like the divine scarlet bird bathed in flame, their vitality cannot be repressed.

About the author

Ge Liang is an exceptional young writer who has a great natural gift and is also well trained, and the The Scarlet Bird is a new type of novel that combines cultural geography with spiritual inquiry. Ge depicts the city of Nanjing in a personal, idiosyncratic fashion, as if it were his own backyard, and writes of the city's many inhabitants as if they were close friends.

—Mo Yan, renowned Chinese author and winner of Nobel Prize for Literature

Ge Liang was born in Nanjing and lives in Hong Kong. He is a graduate of Nanjing University and the University of Hong Kong. A PhD in literature, he holds a teaching post at a university. He is the author of the novels Northern Kite, The Scarlet Bird, Seven Voices, Year of Drama, Questioning the Dead, and Tile Cat and the essay collection Miniature Landscapes, among other publications. His works have been translated into a number of languages including English, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and Korean.