Award-winning author Wang Zhousheng’s novel set in near contemporary Shanghai deals with the contemporary and universal problems of old age and illness and shows how a middle-class Chinese family goes about tackling them.


Retired nurse Ling Deqing is astonished, one day, to find her long divorced 80 year old husband, Xiao Zichen, standing on the doorstep. His second wife, the music teacher, Liu Qing has died and in a fit of absent mindedness, a sign of the onset of dementia, he has found his way back to his first home. Reluctant at first, Ling Deqing eventually takes him back if only to ease the burden on her daughter, Xiao Ying…