A third narrative thread is created by stringing together the stories of young Chinese students, both men and women. South China Morning PostĮxtensive travel around China with occasional flits back home to the U.S., combine with some fascinating speculation on the origins of Chinese civilisation and how the remote past impinges on the present - China Reviewĭip into it. The oracle bones become the title for Hesslers (2006) book because they symbolize the continuity between past, present, and future that characterizes modern China. Oracle Bones, the much anticipated follow-up to his acclaimed debut, River Town, lays bare a rapidly evolving China through his often bizarre encounters with the engines of its social changes. One of the most profoundly original books about China - The EconomistĪ swirl of interconnecting stories and histories make up Peter Hessler's extraordinary, genre-defying second book - Daily Telegraph To encounter one that is as literate and sensitive as Peter Hessler is a joy - Simon Winchester Book.To come across a Westerner patient enough and tolerant enough to try and understand the immense, exasperating and ultimately lovable entity that is China is always a pleasure. Unclipped and with just a slight amount of edge wear. Light toning and spotting to upper text block edge. Hessler helps us discover where the great influential cultures of East and West intersect, but also how the conjunction of past and present creates today's China - and how people create meaning out of chaotic world events. All of them migrants, emigrants or wanderers who find themselves far from home, their lives dramatically changed by historical forces they are struggling to understand.

The narrative tracks his story along with that of Polat, a trader and member of a forgotten ethnic minority, who moves to the West in search of political freedom and a new life William Jefferson Foster, who grew up in an illiterate family in a remote village Emily, a migrant factory worker in a city without a past and Chen Mengjia, a scholar of oracle-bone inscriptions - the earliest known writing in East Asia - and a man whose mysterious story has been lost since his suicide years ago, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. The author himself is a Westerner, a journalist living in Beijing.

Oracle Bones tells its engaging and compelling story through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. Black cloth boards with silver lettering to spine.

Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler