Four Treasures of the Sky

Daiyu aspired to be unlike the sorrowful heroine she was named after—a personified beauty bereft of pain. However, Daiyu is forced to give up the house and future she had planned for herself after being abducted and transported illegally from China to America across the seas. She is compelled to continuously reinvent herself in order to live throughout the next years. We accompany Daiyu as she makes a valiant effort to escape the tragedy that is pursuing her, following her from a calligraphy school to a brothel in San Francisco to a store nestled in the Idaho highlands. Daiyu must draw on all of the personalities she has been, even the ones she most wishes to leave behind, as anti-Chinese sentiment sweeps the nation in a wave of unspeakable violence before she can ultimately claim her own identity and narrative.

Four Treasures of the Sky, both a literary masterwork and a ground-breaking historical fiction novel, introduces Jenny Tinghui Zhang as a distinctive new voice. Immersed in forgotten history and Chinese folktales, this book is an enthralling achievement.