這是一部感人家史，也是貫穿了整個二十世紀的磅礡史詩。本書敘述張戎與她的母親、外祖母三代女性如何在動亂的社會裡掙扎奮鬥的故事。透過三個女人的血緣關係極深刻地縮影了二十世紀中國的社會與歷史。
張戎的外祖母十五歲時就被利欲薰心的父親獻給軍閥作妾，自此開始了坎坷的一生。張戎的母親少女時代是在日軍治下的滿洲國度過，飽嘗了亡國奴的悲痛，寄望共產黨革新中國。在不斷的艱苦磨練中，淬礪為一代新女性。張戎出身高幹家庭，吃共產黨的奶水長大，在歷經大大小小的運動、文化大革命之後，她最後領悟了人生……
本書獲獎 1992年英國NCR圖書獎
1993年英國年度圖書書獎得主
1997年英國讀者評選為二十世紀最具影響力的傳記作品
黛安娜王妃、影星珍 芳達、前英國首相柴契爾夫人、前美國總統老布希夫婦、前香港總督彭定康、英國名作家Martin Amis、J. G. Ballard共同喜愛的傳記。
Through the lives of three different women - grandmother, mother and daughter - this book tells the story of 20th-century China. At times scarcely credible in the details it reveals of the suffering of millions of ordinary Chinese people, it is an unforgettable record of tyranny, hope and ultimate survival under conditions of extreme harshness. In 1924, at the age of 15, the author’s grandmother became the concubine of a powerful warlord, whom she was seldom to see during the 10 years of their ”marriage”. Her daughter, born in 1931, experienced the horrors of Japanese occupation in Manchuria as a schoolgirl, and after their surrender joined the Communist-led underground fighting Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang. She rose to be a senior Communist official, but was imprisoned three times. Her husband, also a high official and one of the very first to join the Communists, was relentlessly persecuted, imprisoned and finally sent to a labour camp where, physically broken and disillusioned, he lost his sanity. The author herself grew up during the Cultural Revolution, at the time of the personality cult of Mao and the worst excesses of the Gang of Four.
She joined the Red Guard but after Mao’s death she was to become one of the first Chinese students to study abroad.
