Bronze and Sunflower

This quiet and gentle story woven through with thoughtfulness and bright love will stay with me a long time. – Zoe Toft * Playing By the Book *The story successfully crosses the cultural divide and young readers will find it engrossing. * The Tribune *However old you are, this book will expand your horizons. * A Year of Reading the World *The perilous life of rural China is meticulously documented in this stunning, slow novel set in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution. * Inis Reading Guide *It is a rare treat to come across a book that you want to keep with you for days after reading, to dip into again at leisure, be it for the beauty of the writing, the resonance of the story, or the luminosity of the imagery. Such a book is Bronze and Sunflower. * Children’s Books Ireland *…Sticking with international books, but in an entirely different vein (though likewise pretty special), there’s the heart-warming Chinese novel Bronze and Sunflower by Cao Wenxuan, in a translation by Helen Wang. It’s a lyrical, engaging story […] set during the Cultural Revolution, which began in China in 1966, but the story feels somehow timeless, too. * The Independent *

Cao Wenxuan is one of China’s most important children’s writers and is widely considered the country’s most subtle and philosophical. He is a professor of Chinese literature at Peking University, and has in turn taught some of China’s best young writers. Many of his books have been bestsellers, including Thatched Cottage and Red Gourd, and his work has been translated into French, Russian, Japanese, Korean and English. Cao has won several of China’s most prestigious awards for children’s literature, including the Song Qingling and Bing Xin prizes, and is current winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award.

Helen Wang has a BA Hons in Chinese from SOAS and is currently a Curator of East Asian Money at the British Museum. She has written and edited numerous books and articles and has been translating from Chinese to English for nearly 25 years, including, for children, Jackal and Wolf by SHEN Shixi and Pai Hua Zi and the Clever Girl by Zhang Xinxin. She lives with her family in north London.