Memory and Oblivion

This award-winning novel, by one of China's most prolific contemporary writers focuses on a middle-class family in near contemporary Shanghai and deals with themes that transcend time and place: family relationships and growing old.

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

In Memory and Oblivion , the larger world disappears into the day-to-day problems of caring for a person with Alzheimer's. But within those problems, Ling Deqing discovers the beauty of family relationships, brought into sharp clarity against the backdrop of oblivion caused by Alzheimer's.