Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Melissa Fu grew up in Northern New Mexico and has lived in Texas, Colorado, New York, Ohio and Washington. She now lives near Cambridge, UK, with her husband and children. With academic backgrounds in physics and English, she has worked in education as a teacher, curriculum developer, and consultant. She was the 2018/19 David TK Wong Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Peach Blossom Spring is her first novel.
Melissa Fu's website
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Dear Reader,
This is a family story. That is, it tells the story of a family. Not my family, but an imagined one. A family created from the stories and anecdotes I learned while researching Peach Blossom Spring. Here is one of the great gifts of fiction: from many threads of human experience, we can weave a tapestry of narrative.
The backbone of the novel follows the trajectory of my father's life and many of his generation who lived through the Sino-Japanese and Chinese Civil wars. For a long time, I knew very little of this story. Only once did he tell us about his youth in China and Taiwan. That afternoon in 1998, I wrote down everything he said. Every date, every city, every scrap of memory he recalled. Since then, I have lived in six different houses and two different countries. Throughout all the moves and miles, I have always known exactly where those notes were. I knew they would be important someday; I just didn't know when.
I have often wondered why he chose that moment to share his memories. Now when I think about it, I realise he was at a peaceful point: he had recently retired and moved to a larger city, he was enjoying being a new grandfather. Maybe, for the first time in a long time, instead of ...
Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists' City, and ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Peach Blossom Spring
Try:
Salt Houses
by Hala Alyan
Yangsze Choo is a fourth-generation Malaysian of Chinese descent. Due to a childhood spent in various countries, she can eavesdrop (badly) in several languages. After graduating from Harvard University, she worked as a ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Peach Blossom Spring
Try:
The Night Tiger
by Yangsze Choo
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