A catastrophic disaster in China triggers a mother’s heartbreaking choice and a daughter’s reconciliation with the past in a powerful novel by the author of A Single Swallow and Where Waters Meet.

In the summer of 1976, an earthquake swallows up the city of Tangshan, China. Among the hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for survival is a mother who makes an agonizing decision that irrevocably changes her life and the lives of her children. In that devastating split second, her seven-year-old daughter, Xiaodeng, is separated from her brother and the mother she loves and trusts. All Xiaodeng remembers of the fateful morning is betrayal.

Thirty years later, Xiaodeng is an acclaimed writer living in Canada with a caring husband and daughter. However, her newfound fame and success do little to cover the deep wounds that disrupt her life, time and again, and edge her toward a breaking point. Xiaodeng realizes the only path toward healing is to return to Tangshan, find her mother, and get closure.

Spanning three decades of the emotional and cultural aftershocks of disaster, Zhang Ling’s intimate epic explores the damage of guilt, the healing pull of family, and the hope of one woman who, after so many years, still longs to be saved.

Zhang Ling is the award-winning author of nine novels and numerous collections of novellas and short stories, including A Single Swallow, translated by Shelly Bryant; Gold Mountain Blues; and Aftershock, which was adapted into China’s first IMAX movie with unprecedented box-office success. Born in China, she moved to Canada in 1986 and, in the mid-1990s, began to write and publish fiction in Chinese while working as a clinical audiologist. Since then, she has won the Chinese Media Literature Award for Author of the Year, the Grand Prize of Overseas Chinese Literary Award, and China Times’s Open Book Award. Where Waters Meet is her first novel written in English.

Zhang Ling's profile page

Shelly Bryant divides her year between Shanghai and Singapore, working as a poet, writer, and translator. She is the author of nine volumes of poetry, a pair of travel guides for the cities of Suzhou and Shanghai, a book on classical Chinese gardens, and a short story collection. She has translated Chinese text for publishers such as Penguin Books and various organizations, including the National Library Board in Singapore and the Human Sciences Research Council. Her translation of Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012, and her translation of You Jin’s In Time, Out of Place was short-listed for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2016. Shelly received a Distinguished Alumni award from Oklahoma Christian University in 2017.

Shelly Bryant's profile page

“This beautiful, quietly profound story examines the resilience and fragility of humans in the face of disaster. But at its heart, Aftershock is about family and how we protect the ones we love.” —Booklist

“Author Zhang Ling's gift for the kind of narrative driven storytelling style that raises Aftershock to an impressive level of literary excellence, is deftly translated into English for an American readership by Shelly Bryant…An inherently interesting Chinese family saga, Aftershock is especially and unreservedly recommended…” —Midwest Book Review